III

The Column Which, Licked Until the Tongue Bleeds, Cures Jaundice

Abou’l-Ma’Ateh Mosque.—On the outskirts of Damietta.

What a heroic treatment this, consuming with one’s tongue
Which is not to be sheathed until some blood from it is wrung,
After a thousand other idiots, this pillar’s sides!
But unto what not bend the knee or chase with rapid strides,
(Hope! king of levers! every rich uncle in America
((That land still young, still unexhausted, in a blessed state,
—A virgin it was banished from our atlas till so late—
Where they bag twenty times more gold than we do here the while,
Whether it is that—appetizing things require what’s vile—
One manufactures fertilizer by the hundred ton
For those unending fields where, healthy, with cold noses, run
(((One day alone can make a mad dog of an ailing pup;
To be sure always that that liquid which is gobbled up
By newborn babies, though it be the best brought up of those,
Is coming from the friend of man and varnishes his nose
Is not, let us be careful here, an act less necessary
Than: if the enemy should chance to send an emissary,
Upon the interloper’s eyes a blindfold to apply;
—To mark about his landau, when a king is passing by,
East, west, and north, and south by a policeman bicyclist;
—When, chief of the conspirators, obliged to make a list
Of names, to put into the coding all the wit one’s got;
—So that the thieving bird will hesitate to stuff his gut
To decorate with scarecrows all the land one cultivates;
—When old ((((our mop of hair amid our winter emigrates;
Go off when he transforms himself to a sun wintering))))
To force oneself to shun the draught or else to wear a cap;
—When one has gone from bad to worse at cards or shooting crap,
To put in life annuities what’s left one from one’s club;
—To bolt the door when it is time to climb into the tub;
—Before one’s work upon a tightrope is to be essay
To get a pole for balancing))), a hundred dogs, who aid
(((O need of aid! O need sublime, O universal need!
Unaided how much time we’d need to see the salt indeed
With which a word is saturated, or an anecdote!
So that the parrot may speak drivel clearly from his throat
Must not one of us cut the frenum by his tongue possessed?
The emperor, his hand emerging lukewarm from his vest
By breathing in some snuff brings his creative powers back;
The superstitious person who has had his mirror crack
In his distress calls on, to exorcise the fated things,
Two of his fingers, which, in motion as if moved by springs,
The program notes for a ballet—for gesture, which adorns,
Has also limits—clear up its imbroglio naive;
Thanks to the fingernail the penknife’s secrets we perceive,
When swallowed is the juice of grape, then that explorer agile,
The tongue, from every corner chases out the skins and seeds;)))
Whether one opens a hotel in a height’s heathful air
That’s patronized by the debilitated millionaire;
Whether one sells in job-lots to the speculating snob
(((The role snobbism plays ((((to tell the truth, what was Jacob?^*
And are we even sure that God, when he made snobbishness
(If animals do not know better how to pierce an isthmus
Than they do how to weigh the sun, or how to master steam,
To make the sky their goal, and feel a fear that is extreme
Of a sojourn surrounded by eternal fiery sparks,
Or, if they speak, to leave off making personal remarks,
Between one and a human being, still, what analogues!
Do we not rediscover our own instincts in the hogs?
In the life-saving dogs who hurl themselves into the swim?),
Decreed for man that it belonged exclusively to him?
We’ll wager that the mule (as a mount to be used in battle
The horse is nobler than the ass; instead of the pack-saddle,
It’s the machine-gun by which he is wounded, in front, he;
And everything about him signals his nobility,
Whereas one is less sure, who in a crowd of humans stands,
To recognize by carriage, or by whiteness of the hands,
The individual who sinks beneath a title’s weight
Than:—the ataxic, all off balance, by his crazy gait
Which, as he passes, drives berserk each nasty little pooch;
—The drowner of his cares, who, in the places that seel hooch,
With elbow light, and heavy brow, gets plastered rapidly,
By his breath, by his gate ((like our ataxic, as we see)),
And by the clearness of his mighty horizontal jet;
—Great genius by the supernatural support he’ll get
By the historic insult he must swallow in the dawn
Before he forms a school and puts Messiah’s garments on;
—By his blood when he spits, and by his calves thin as a cock’s
The man who is invaded by the bacillus of Koch;
—By his lips toward which there dips a nose of chosen ones
And by his eyes red at the edges one of Israel’s sons;
—A thinker by his face’s wrinkles;—by the twitch whereby
His nose is contradicting him, the man who tells a lie;
—By the rings on their left hands, the victims of the mayor;)
Suffers because one wed beneath his place: his mother, where
(In whom is double aspect, though it comes, as a surprise
((When, underneath a sun proud that from our it takes the prize,
In those lands of siesta where the fireplace is unknown,
The woman, black or white, who has an offspring colored brown,
Is she, if he should go to sleep, less ready to speak low,
Less trembling, later, watching over his attempts to go,
When, laughing, he finds equilibrium for the first time?))
Still paralyzes in no wise that fibre so sublime
Which Solomon excited, making his decision fair)
He had for his first resting place he belly of a mare;
—His father stallion if it be his mother is an ass.
Pure snob, inflated by the birthright bought to raise his class
Which Esau cried about, himself a snob, in stomaching:))))
Was, is, and shall be to the finish preponderating:)))
The paintings of a school whose name into his head you drum:
Whether one founds a newspaper, whether one sells a gum
Apt—so the label says—to force, if there should be a need,
(((Proof that “to be deceived” is oft the same thing as “to read”:
—Bad checks paid out without delay and no apparent care;
—What’s written on ((((not having traveled farther than Asnières))))
The darts that have been dipped in poison which the negro throws,
The ring that cuts across the separation of their nose,
Or else their deserts without end, so empty there is not
A single pebble one could find that would be good to put
Against the back teeth of a future orator, it’s true,
In his Impressions d’Afrique, by the false explorer, who
((((Making what’s pleasant alternate with that which is severe,
As it is ordered in a verse which all of us revere)))),
When he’s placed a tough hydrological first course to eat
About a river such that next to it a wrung out sheet
Would seem to be creating but a tear that’s falling there,
And Europe seem to have for most important thoroughfare
((((Although it be a question of the Danube)))) but a fount,
Has follow it, without a stop for breath, a raw account
Of the rapports of love and money for each other’s sakes
In civilized communities on rivers ((((sugar takes
Away the taste left over by a bitter remedy:))))
And the climax, to know that at the river’s mouth the sea
Is destitute of salt for a considerable space;
—When a false blind man passes by, with a convincing face,
The little notice offered to the sympathetic eye;
—The fake certificate of the physician you can buy;
—The needle having gone berserk, of compasses the dial
And, finally, the label which is carried by a phial . . .
In fact, how many dreary drugs are given eulogies
By the inventor ((((who, severe, treats as obscenities^*
A thing in its own class uniqueness rarely may assert,
As formerly, in their respective classes, might:—the shirt
Which Hercules, with Dejanira’s aid, had after Nessus;
—In simple human beings the notorious processus
(Who else has ever had the luck to feel his lifeblood flows,
After he once has, rigid, been temptation to the crows?)
From ill, which many saw of Lazarus had been the blight;
—The efficacity of fish upon extinguished sight
When Tobias was in surgery, and Raphael was near;
—The effort nature made, forgetting her abhorrent fear,
When she permitted (everything in Holy Scripture’s true)
A narrow vacuum spontaneously cut in two
The sea that interrupted Israel’s getaway;—the halt
One evening, toward the hour when its sublimities exalt
Those who have foreheads that by genius have been made to swell,
The fiery sun effected, that it might serve Joshua well;
The gold that grew upon a certain ram instead of hair.
The compounds made by others of a species similar)))),
Though, whether they are old or new, they’re no more efficacious
Than:—a bard’s name, whose work is little read, upon the masses;
—Upon a fire completely out the bellows breathing faster;
—Upon a wooden leg the strongest-acting mustard plaster;
—Upon the sight, when it is of an artificial eye,
A drop of belladonna;))) to rise, menacing the sky
(((Vain menace, for we know the nearest star on which we look
Is still too far for anything to take it off its hook;)))
The rebel moustache, which no blow of iron can compel
To sacrifice its passion, O alas! to menace hell;
Whether one makes a liquid—poison from which is recalled
To life by nothing the sly germ whose job is making bald—
Able to bring about the death of hair-salesmen by hunger;))
Instructs his nephews how to follow, with his eye and finger,
His rigorous caprice, if it be fruitful or absurd,
—His nephews, gnawing at their nails, who, when is sneeze is heard
Have, joyous, dreams of crepe, and floods which from the eyelids spill),
To bring about inside oneself cessation of an ill.