(MONK'S HOUSE, RODMELL, 1933)
The downs sizzle across the marsh
with all the dust and ashes of my brain.
I hold a green parasol to deflect the sunrays
scorching like embers of my last sensual dreams.
I could write oodles of volumes about the lives
I lived in just one second of this silence
to finally celebrate the heat fainting
among the dahlias, near a vagabond
kipping under a gorse shrubbery.
I lay flat on the grass at Leonard's feet,
follow the flight of a white owl
crossing the meadow to Brighton.
My white owl soaring above cornfields, blue wagons;
my black spaniel barking the sheep away.
A draught of digitalis is slowing my pulse.
Who brought home this great jar of oleanders?
You? Don't remember...
An Emperor moth hovers over their heady aroma
blended into the smell of rain.
Reading Jane Austen's letters by a log fire
She died at 42, the best to come
Leonard has turned on the wireless:
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring...
Asheham Cement is now all noise and smoke by day
and light by night. The Rite of Progress...
Ah meretricious gesture of my fingers
wriggling into my crotch. I miss your presence
in the green fields of Kent, dancing high
on cider, hashish and Lady-bits.
I am still spinning with the last night shindy:
dressed up as Queen Victoria on her wedding night
I fell into the arms of the Prince Consort
suddenly turned by charm into a black savage
of Mauritania in the nude. Halfcut he whispered:
"I want to film The Waves"
The outcome upon the royal blood
has yet to be discovered.
The thrushes sing. Leonard is pruning the fig tree,
and Violet Trefusis sent me a bunch of lilacs.
I like her drinking brown ale in purple satin.
How can I smooth out all the glooms of late?
Miss you, Donkey, I want pink towers, green follies,
moats and swans, one tireless bull pacing
up and down. You, in shorts. Me with no garters,
no undergarments, my gingerous muff pearled with dew
blossoming in your mouth.
No more digitalis. No more Spanish wine.
Ah it was the sight of your gaiters
that inspired Orlando
("the gaiters and what lies beyond")
as the sight of the violet socks
of Fabrizio del Dongo
flared up the passion in Madame Sanseverina.
I write all this twaddle while travelling books
on the way to Sussex
My teacher is called Bianca Weiss. I am learning
the language of love and dolce far niente
Tell me, amore, what are you doing in New York?
Do you like Blacks as Nancy Cunard?
Did a handsome one screwed you ever?
London is so quiet, one hears a man
blowing his nose in Kensington High Street.
Almost dreamily I write Flush, a silly book, a joke,
O write me long letters on violet scented paper.
Flush is black in the novel though was red in real life.
You are always mauve in dreams.
Please, darling, ask me to Sissinghurst.
Ask me to be off in my car to Italy.
Ask me to be one of those virgins you deflower
and make them the most awesome flowers in Pink Tower.
Now I must take a bath, all lust and ink stained.
Must dress and take a hamson cab to a dinner in Pall Mall...
Did I tell you I'm going to be painted naked by a woman
who says I am the image of Lilith?*
Did I tell you my notion of Heaven is mushrooms?
Did I tell you I have a marmoset that nibbles on my ear,
bites my nipple and I come?
Would you ring me up to Lewes 385 soon?
Though your voice in the telephone
is a leaf in the breeze.
Send me a basket full of quinces afresh.
*Ethel Walker (Scottish artist, 1861-1951)
