The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMinna and Myself

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMinna and MyselfThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Minna and MyselfAuthor: Maxwell BodenheimContributor: Ben HechtRelease date: April 4, 2019 [eBook #59203]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MINNA AND MYSELF ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Minna and MyselfAuthor: Maxwell BodenheimContributor: Ben HechtRelease date: April 4, 2019 [eBook #59203]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

Title: Minna and Myself

Author: Maxwell BodenheimContributor: Ben Hecht

Author: Maxwell Bodenheim

Contributor: Ben Hecht

Release date: April 4, 2019 [eBook #59203]Most recently updated: January 24, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MINNA AND MYSELF ***

Minna and Myself MAXWELL BODENHEIM Pagan Publishing Company New York City :: :: :: 1918

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Our thanks to the following publications, for their kindnessin permitting us to reprint, in this volume,poems that have appeared in their pages:TheLittle Review;Poetry; theNew Republic;theCentury; the New YorkTribune;theTouchstone; theSevenArts; thePagan; theEgoist.Copyright, 1918.Pagan Publishing Co.New YorkDEDICATED BY BOTH OF US TOFedya Ramsay

MINNAPoemsMYSELFPoemsTHE MASTER POISONERA One-Act Poetic Play by Maxwell Bodenheim and Ben HechtPOET’S HEARTA Poetic Play in One Act

MINNA

Poems

MYSELF

Poems

THE MASTER POISONER

A One-Act Poetic Play by Maxwell Bodenheim and Ben Hecht

POET’S HEART

A Poetic Play in One Act

It is hard for me to realize that this is a first volume of verse. Most of the initial ventures that have passed under my jaundiced eye have been precisely what such early collections are expected to be. They were, as Wilde expressed it somewhere, “promissory notes—that are never met.”... But though it is hard for me to believe that this is a first book, it is still harder for me to believe that this is Maxwell Bodenheim’s first book. In these days of the much advertised “poetic renaissance,” when theDialout-radicals theLittle Review, and even the New YorkTribuneprintsvers-libreon its editorial page, I expected to see nothing less than Bodenheim’s Collected works.... This pleasure will evidently have to be deferred.... Meanwhile, here is an indication, and no slight one, of how distinguished and decorative that collection will be. Without Kreymborg’s caustic and acerb irony, or Johns’ fluent lyricism, Bodenheim has something that neither they nor, for that matter, any of his colleagues in “Others” possess. I refer to his extreme sensitivity to words. Words, under his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober adjectives bear fantastic fruit. It is a strange and often magic potion he brews from them; dark and fiery liquids that he pours into curiously designed cups. Sometimes he gets drunk with his own distillation, and reels between preciosity and incoherence. Sometimes the mixture is so strong that even his metaphors, crowding about each other, become inextricably mixed. But asa rule, Bodenheim is as clear-headed as he is colorful. Among the younger men he has no superior in his use of the verbalnuance.

But it is not merely as word-juggler that Bodenheim shines. He has an imagination that he uses both as a tool and as a toy. Personally, I care more for Bodenheim when he plays with his images (as in “Poet to His Love,” “Hill Side Tree” and certain of the poems to “Minna”), than when his figures attempt to build or destroy something (as in “To An Enemy,” “The Interne,” “Soldiers”). It is as a decorator that his gifts serve him best. Even such an intimate picture as “Factory Girl” is saved from mawkishness by his delicate sense of design. The composition in which Death is seen as

“...a black slave with little silver birdsPerched in a sleeping wreath upon his head”

has a quality that suggests the Beardsley of “Under the Hill.” In the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks with a light but sure footstep.

There are doubtless other things—sharper and more important—in the following poems that will attract many. But the ones that I have found seem to have a quiet, unofficial, dignity of their own. Others may ask for more. For me, they are sufficient.

LOUIS UNTERMEYER.

Twilight pushes down your eyesWith shimmering, pregnant fingersThat leave you covered with still-born touch.With little whips of dead wordsSilence cuts your lips to a keener red.Your heart strikes its bed of dark mirth, in death,And your hands lie over it, guarding the corpse.Night will soon whisk away this roomBut you are already invisible.

Your cheeks are spent diminuendosSheering into the rose-veiled silence of your lips.Your eyes are gossamer coquettesRinged with the sparkling breath of dead loves.Your body strays into lanterns of formStrewing the night within this room....The light dies; you are stillAnd spill the frolicing night of your heartOver the darkness about you, making it pale.

Your criss-crossed ringlets of hairAre tipped with faltering opalescence.At dawn a lost smile ever returnsAnd hides in your hair because he fearsThe solemn marble profile of your face.His presence caresses your lips to wings of colorThat beat against each other and releaseDulcet, feathery tinges of love descending to your heart.And thus, each morning, your rising heartWears a new bridal robe.

Moonlight bends over black silence,Making it bloom to wild-flowers of soundThat only green things can hear.A wind sprawls over an orchard,Frightening its silent litany to sound.A thread of star-light has fallen to this treeAnd curls among its leaves, tangling them to silence....Standing amidst these things, Beloved,We feel the words our hearts cannot form.

Pain is a country cousin of yours.He flings buds of awakening desiresUpon the stately weddings in your heart,And laughs.You must teach him better manners;Bind his mouth with pale sleep;Caress him with trailing handsThat loosen the buds he has stolen, into flowers.

We met upon nearby hill-tops of our livesAnd shook the dust from us, revealing flame-laced clothesAnd eyeing each other in the same moment.You curved a longing to the wave of your arm:A longing for dark rest crossed by unbidden gifts.And my eyes deepened in answer....Then we floated down to the valley between us:The valley ringed with smooth honey-combs of sleep.

You have a morning-glory faceWhose edges are sensitive to lightAnd curl in beneath the burden of a smile.Remembered silence returns to the morning-gloryAnd lattices its curvesWith shades of golden reverberations.Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to lovesWhose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul.

You draw my heart about you, as a cloak,And your words steal over it like a reluctant color:A color of pain that fears to die.My heart ripples with your slight turningBut sometimes moves when you are still,Beckoning to longings that have not reached your mouth.

Sedate and archaic, a twilight-frilled hazeWalks over the meadows like rolled-out centuriesQuivering in sprightly welcome.Trees pushed down by silence;Trees lolling in comely abandon;Trees pungently flamboyant,Their leaves spinning in the wind’s golden elusiveness.Trees probing the shrilly sensitive sunsetLike little, laced nightmares leaningUpon a scarlet breast;Trees sprinkling their stifled mockeryUpon the blue tomb of the air;Trees, are you silenced beingsWhitening into the winding paradiseOf old loves seeking a second death?And has this archaic, twilight-frilled hazeMoulded me to your semblance?

The wrinkled grimaces of eastern skiesAre caught on the Chinese mirrors of your eyesAnd lie, pallid and benign.Your mouth is a senile dragonSpitting fire-fly words from its vermillion shroud.Your cheeks are shrunken silences of GodsPaling out upon ivoried Nirvanas of silk.Your face holds fugitive bits of your heartThat wandered away and returned to rest.

Your body was puzzling, like a half-made figureTill the final shaping of your voice cameAnd riotous secrets of lines curved outAnd trembled upon your limbs.Then silence touched your body to motion:Your limbs released fleeing andantes of painAnd your heart flung little crescents of budding caressesInto the waiting hunger of your eyes.

You are a well sprayed with cool rubies of soundIn which I bathe and rise with another skinLike moon-stone passion slyly courtingThe light breath of a tired dream.I drop my heart into the depthsOf your disheveled serenity,And stroll off empty.When my heart has merged to your shades of pearl quietnessI return and once more drop within you.

The mellow anger of his hairDisputes his sleepy girl’s face.His robe glows like a painted woundUpon the bent meditation of his body.His hands are so thin that silence bruises them:Thin from the pressure brought by endless prayers...When you were with me I did not knowThat your voice was pouring him out in molten colorsTo be shaped by the fingers of my memory—This prince-made-of-many-deal-loves.

Sometimes jaded, sometimes tranquil,Your eyes invade the tumult of your face.Your lips are the remnants of a loveThat made a sunset-cup of your face.The movements of your bodyCaress the couch you sit on into soundThat seems to answer your words.You are restless because upon this couchThe cold touch of your lover liesAnd seeps into you, reaching your heart.

Your arms, in faltering crescendos,Wander through the roomTinted with expectation of night.The room seems a tottering tombThrough which you roam with handsStriving to press each form into the shapeOf someone buried beneath you....Only when night sprays the room with his breathDo you change to that which you seek.

Two walls, dizzy with rain-touchAnd suffused with gauzily amorous sunlight,Creep over a hill and meet.And so our foreheads touch.Silence between our hands grows into clasped musicSprinkling our finger-tips with attenuated chords of touch.Our hearts weave low songs to this accompaniment:So low that even silence cannot hear.

Two walls, dizzy with rain-touchAnd suffused with gauzily amorous sunlight,Creep over a hill and meet.And so our foreheads touch.

Silence between our hands grows into clasped musicSprinkling our finger-tips with attenuated chords of touch.Our hearts weave low songs to this accompaniment:So low that even silence cannot hear.

Afternoon sunlight limps tenuously away,Leaving a snarled retrospect of golden foot-marks.The sea is pregnant with gracious discordsThat falteringly shroud the sleep-rhythmed breasts of winds.The sky is a genially vacant stare.Remaining touches of starlightTremble the leaves when air is still....And so my love for you strolls through this day,Picking up forgotten hints of its heart.

Maiden

My heart is a slovenly russet peasant-girlFlirting with staidly immaculate swains.

Youth

And mine is summer-rainStrewing itself in mirthful swirlsOver the odorous pain of flowersThat long to dance.

Maiden

My heart will walk through yours,Holding its crushed robe in both handsAnd quieting, with gentle nakedness,The mirthful rain and odorous pain in your heart.

Youth

When your heart leaves mine it will be an old womanWith two of my shrunken flowers for her breasts.

Your breast is the bridal-couch of our stillness.The restless beggar of our breathLeaves the folding of stillness, reeling with gifts,With dreams in which we glimpse our own scars.We give these reflections of scars to stillnessAnd she turns them into bitter hummingbirdsOffering us the colored death of songHeld out in her enticing hands.

Like prayers born dead, long shadowsStrew the floor and clutch at your feet,But buoyant with paint you walk to and fro.The room is garlanded with unseen eyesThat you must evade lest they touch you into sightAnd send you, naked, into the moonlight.

Your body is a closed fanHolding long brush-strokes of glowing repose.Your words clumsily unloosen the fanAnd it dips to the rustling birth of forgotten doubts.Your soul bears the fan lightly in his handAnd waves to the mirror his blind eyes cannot touch.

The gown you wear is curiously like sound—Tangles of dahlia-murmurs taking shapeIn shrinking, mellow sprays.The everlasting journey of your heartGliding over a sleepy litanyThat winds through scattered star-flowers of regrets:The everlasting journey of your heartIs like a fragile traveler of sound—A murmur seeking the love that gave it birth.

Whenever a love dies within you,Griefs, phosphorescent with unborn tears,Cut the glowing hush of a meadow within you:Griefs striking their pearl-voiced cymbalsAnd shaping the silences once held by your love.Your new love blows a trumpet of sunlightInto the meadow, and your griefsLeap into the echo and return to you.

We blew a luminous confusion of thoughtsUpon the silence of our souls,Staining it to little, weeping tints.Our hands pressed serpentine pain into each otherAnd stroked it away to twilights of relief.Our lips shook before the tread of coming words,But closed again, finding no need for them.

Upon an arched sarcophagus of painAre figures painted in arrested embracesWith outlines so light that we must bend close to see:Old loves almost merging to one toneOf pale regret that holdsAn inner glow of dead weeping.Our lips cling and our breath winds to a handWith touch like summer rainBlending the arrested figures upon the arched sarcophagus of pain.

Make of your voice, a dawnDropping little gestures upon my forehead,While slumber-edged thoughts rise in my headAnd wave back greetings droll and confused.Pain has jested with the whirling nightAnd both vanish like an untold prayer,So, make of your voice, a dawnDropping little gestures upon my forehead.

Your mind is a little, clandestine pastelShaped into a posture of rigid grief.Its colors huddle togetherAnd make a stunted, aching lyric....Ah frail-flowered moment preceding reality—Your eyelids open; the little pastel dies.

An old silver church in a forestIs my love for you.The trees around itAre words that I have stolen from your heart.An old silver bell, the last smile you gave,Hangs at the top of my church.It rings only when you come through the forestAnd stand beside it.And then, it has no need for ringing,For your voice takes its place.

I shall walk down the road.I shall turn and feel upon my feetThe kisses of Death, like scented rain.For Death is a black slave with little silver birdsPerched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.He will tell me, his voice like jewelsDropped into a satin bag,How he has tip-toed after me down the road,His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me.Then he will graze me with his handsAnd I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birdsBetween the cold waves of his hair, as he tip-toes on.

The ruins of your face were twined with youth.Vines of starlight questioned your face when you smiled.Your eyes dissolved over distancesAnd steeped the graves of many loves.Night was kind to your body:The careless vehemence of curvesSoftened beneath your darkly-loosened dress.And your heart toyed with an emotionThat left you vague hunger poised over death.

The dust of many roads has been my grey wine.Surprised beech-trees have bowedWith me, to the plodding morningHumming tunes frail as webs of dead perfume,To his love in golden silks, the departed moon.Maidens like rose-flooded statuesHave bathed me in the wine of their silence.But now I walk on, alone.And only after watching many evenings,Do I dance a bit with dying wisps of moon-light,To persuade myself that I am young.

But now I walk on, alone.And only after watching many evenings,Do I dance a bit with dying wisps of moon-light,To persuade myself that I am young.

Blinder than oak-trees in the windEndlessly weaving sighs into a poemTo sight,He sits, the light of one pale purple lanternSeeping into his dream-hollowed face,Like floating, transparent wordsPale with unuttered meanings.He mends a flute and sighs as thoughIts shadow leaned heavily upon his heartAnd told him things his dead eyes could not grasp.

You seemed a caryatid meltingInto the wind-blown, dark blue temple of the sky.But you bent down as I came closer, breaking the image.When I passed, you raised your headAnd blew the little feather of a smile upon me.I caught it on open lips and blew it back.And in that moment we loved,Although you stood still waiting for your lover,And I walked on to my love.

Like a drowsy, rain-browned saint,You squat, and sometimes your voiceIn which the wind takes no part,Is like mists of music wedding each other.A drunken, odor-laced peddler is the morning wind.He brings you golden-scarfed citiesWhose voices are swirls of bells burdened with summer;And maidens whose hearts are galloping princes.And you raise your branches to the sky,With a whisper that holds the smile you cannot shape.

The lilies sag with rain-drops:Their petals hold fire that does not break out.(As though it slept between vapor-silkIt could not burn).And a young breeze stumbles upon the liliesAnd strokes them with his spinning hands....The lilies and the young breeze are not unlikeYour silence and the rush of soft words breaking it.

I came upon a maidenBlowing rose petals in the airAnd catching them, as they fell,Upon quick fingertipsHer laugh fell lighter than the petalsAnd dropped little gestures upon my forehead.I gave her sadness and she blew it upAs she had blown the rose petals:And it almost seemed joy as her fingers caught it.But I was only a wanderer plaited with dust,Who gave her new petals to play with.

You were in the room, yet your bodyWas stone cut in drooping linesAnd hued with decorous puzzling pinks and browns.Even your hair seemed an elfin wigCarelessly thrown upon your stone head.And your eyes were hollows cradling broken shadows.When you spoke your body did not change:It was as though a flock of sleepy birdsHad issued from your stone mouth.

Vague words tapered off to pale weariness,And sunlight was night smiling in his sleep.Your hands moved as though they sought a dying emotion:Your lips, drawn back, seemed evading sound.When twilight fell upon us,Like night striving to forget his dream,We had long since passed out of the room.

A mood whose heart was a flagon of ashes,Met another mood whose lips were stainedWith the odors of sleeping wine-songs.The second mood kissed the breast of the firstAnd filled the ashen flagon with his pale purple breath.Then the two moods died, and he who bore them,Being an old man, sat down to make others.

Like the arms of a child lifting shining white lilies from a little brown pond,Sunlight drew songs from this lithe, grimacing negressWhose skin was smoother than the cloudless sky above her.The flecks of cotton they picked brought a changing white stuporTo the negroes about her, but she swung down her row,With broad smiles cutting her pent-up satin face.And though the afternoon slowly pressed down her back,She never ceased humming to her joyous Christ.

Grey, drooping-shouldered bushes scrape the edgesOf bending swirls of yellow-white flowers.So do my thoughts meet the wind-scattered color of you.A green-shadowed trance of waterIs splintered to little, white tasseled awakeningsBy the beat of long, black oars.So do my thoughts enter yours.Split, brown-blue clouds press into each otherOver hills dressed in mute, clinging haze.So do my thoughts slowly formOver the draped mystery of you.

Grey, drooping-shouldered bushes scrape the edgesOf bending swirls of yellow-white flowers.So do my thoughts meet the wind-scattered color of you.

A green-shadowed trance of waterIs splintered to little, white tasseled awakeningsBy the beat of long, black oars.So do my thoughts enter yours.

Split, brown-blue clouds press into each otherOver hills dressed in mute, clinging haze.So do my thoughts slowly formOver the draped mystery of you.

Why are your eyes like dry brown flower-pods,Still, gripped by the memory of lost petals?I feel that if I touched themThey would crumble to falling brown dustAnd you would stand with blindness revealed.Yet, you would not shrink, for your lifeHas been long since memorized,And eyes would only melt out against its high walls.Besides, in the making of boxesSprinkled with crude forget-me-nots,One is curiously blessed if ones eyes are dead.

A fan of smoke in the long, green-white revery of the sky,Slowly curls apart.So shall we rise and widen out in the silence of air.

An old man runs down a little yellow roadTo an out-flung, white thicket uncovered by morning.So shall I swing to the white sharpness of death.

Sun-light recedes on the mountains, in long gold shafts,Like the falling pillars of a temple.Then singing silence almost too nimble for ears:The mountain-tenors fling their broad voicesInto the blue hall of the sky,And through a rigid column of these voicesNight dumbly walks.Night, crushing sound between his fingersUntil it forms a lightly frozen couchOn which he dreams.

Her voice was like rose-fragrance waltzing in the wind.She seemed a shadow stained with shadow colorsSwinging through waves of sunlight.Perhaps her heart was an old minstrelSleepily pawing at his little mandolin.

In me is a little painted squareBordered by old shops, with gaudy awnings.And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men,Drinking sunlight.The old men are my thoughts:And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart,And quietly unload supplies.We fill slim pipes and chat,And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the square....Strong men, tinkling women, and dripping, squealing childrenStroll past us, or into the shops.They greet the shopkeepers, and touch their hats or foreheads to me....Some evening I shall not return to my people.

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