The Buffoon

The Buffoon

"Give me wine." --Emerson

"De joie, je prenais une expression bouffone et égarée au possible." --Rimbaud

"HURRY UP PLEASE, IT'S TIME." --T. S. Eliot

Hear Part I

---Drinks too much and is afraid of aches,
"But Sordello and my Sordello?"
Are hominymnical twins, a pair of Diogenes,
Illuminating the world with the glow from a cigarette,
Seeking luxe, calme, et volupté beyond the Bastille
Or over the next bear-travelled hill.
But sleep, sleep Miriam
Songe à la douceur
For our feet are clothed
In paper soles
With holes.

But the future is a serious matter
And pop goes the soda water
And the hock improves with age
Regardless of quality
Like most poetry.
And the balloon of la lune
Comme un point sur un i
Bursts on the sharp cross
Of Christiani-t
At four with cakes
And then some blood red sherry
Till cherry ripe themselves do cry
The sirens skiing on the lakes.

And now it is time for all good men
To come to the aid of the arty,
The serious ones, and get them drunk
Let them taste what they drink,
And, above all, make them wink--
Nota: man is the soil of his intelligence,
The hovering boast, the Eden of wise worms,
The manure of theologic agriculture:
Mela mi fe, disfecemi uva.

Fill for me a brimming bowl
With some conducting liquid
Electrocute my neon soul
Certi semper aliquid
Propinendum est.
Give a rouse here's in hell's despite now
King Charles . . . walking gently on the moors
Picking the scattered flowers:
They love me, they love me not.

And this is the preface
The comedian's wired smile
The mask that soon grows to your face
Like old bandages
That must be removed in a flash of pain
Or teased off in tedious agony,
And alcohol's the best solvent.

If the first is Beauty
And the second Truth
And the third Goodness
And the youngest Stinkie
If the mean old father
Spawls in a draft
And catches patricide.
If Beauty loves life
And Truth himself
And Goodness loves God
And Stinkie hates all three
If the father's unquestionably dead
And cannot therefore be taken lightly,
Qu'est-ce que nous faison? Chto nam delat?

If all his days
One sings and plays
And drinks his dinner
But gets no thinner
And loves the girls
And gives them pearls

That man is quite naturally suspect.
The butler didn't do it---Stinkie did,
But Beauty was blamed
For he drank and sang.

Poète, enivre-toi et chante
Et surtout chante-toi du vin
Comme Villon et comme Dante
Pour tout est le vin à la fin.

And now indeed it is time
The barman is stacking the chairs
We alone remain alone
Together here, reflected in separate glasses.
You tell me of trouble, of want, of hunger,
And I speak of thirst, and art, and verse,
Yet we both have danced and sung
But that was minutes ago when we were young
Before the cry that echoes yet in the empty room
It's time. Hurry up please, it's time, it's time.

And what is time?
A river chased by a thinking Greek
Looking for yesterday's bathwater.
And time, and time for what?
For sleep, the drowsy barman says,
But sleep, perchance to dream,
Aye, there's the rub.
The Babe, the Babe in the snow--
It's crying with hunger and the Mother's breasts are dry.

There is more in this world, my darling,
Than your sociology dreams of.
And to act is to destroy
And to destroy is to be destroyed
And to be still is madness.
So let's return to song and dance
Sleepy time gal, turn night to day
We'll buy another fifth of Grant's
And sit and drink and rise to play
Where the music's loud and doesn't stop
We'll drink and dance until we drop.

And what shall we do tomorrow?
What shall we ever do?
We can't even put our lands in order.
We can't build walls around our border,
The Scythians come and steal our grain
And grain is scarce for there's been no rain.
And so tomorrow we'll dance again,
Sing and dance again for rain.

You speak of drought and hunger
I but of thirst and song
But since I loved that silly grin
That graced your face when you were young
I'll dip my pen in sweet red wine
And write on whitest bread
So the thirsty may read my verses
While the hungry can eat them instead.

II

Hear Part II

O to be a poet
Now that winter's here
To sit at my desk by the fire
With paper and pencil and beer
Making a world of rhyming words
Where there is no hair-white snow;
Where lovely nymphs as naked as birds
Don't know the civilized No.
But what's this draft which spoils my ease?
It's Wordsworth's damned correspondent breeze
Which makes my ribs an Aeolian harp,
And plays a tune either flat or sharp
But never it seems his harmonious verse,
For the world is going from bad to worse.

But the crying time is passed:
Religion, like the milk, is spilt,
And now our aesthetic is to trace
The white configuring patterns
Over the edge of the table
To the greasy pool on the rug.

The waxy wings of Icarus
Must have left such a spot
On the wavy rug of water
Near Greece where he fell.

We (qui morituri)
Do not sleep well
But lie still, listening
To darkness stumbling about the house,
And worry over the rattle, the bang, the thud,
The sounds of his subtle demolitions,
Till dawn brings the confidence of a seeming sameness
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

Would you please tell me, Mr. Juan,---
"Don't be so formal, call me Don"---
If in the harem of what's-his-name
You met a girl of doubtful fame
Who was as sweet and kind as milk,
Who had skin soft as purple silk,
Who always either laughed or cried,
And took a certain feminine pride
In doing things that housewives do
Like mixing drinks and cooking stew.
She was my love once long ago
But left me like the winter snow.

"Ah yes I know the one you mean
She cried like rain and sighed like wind."
Like snow she melted from my arms in Spring
I in Autumn left like the blowing leaves,
Withered, jaundiced, tired of everything
That Summer offered to replace her with.
An empty winter came. The naked trees
Were no more gray nor grim than I. Alone
I lay those windy nights, hoping to seize
In a dream perhaps that other dream who'd gone.
But sleep came slowly when it came at all,
And brought thoughts of death and visions of hell.

It did not seem quite like it is
This is more like life than death
And though I know I must go back
And tell of hell's huge torturing rack
The tale I tell will be of life:
All our hells are made of life.

On that same path that Orpheus trod
Accompanied by Euridyce and his harp
I walk alone in search of her yet
With a tear-stained memory for a map.

But give me a drink
And time not to think
And with this poem
I'll entice her home:

Come live with me and be my love
And you will never see a stove
We'll hire a maid and eat out often
The kitchen will never be your coffin.
And all you'll have to do is work
And earn enough to feed my clerk
While I dictate verses all the day long
To set heaven straight and right the world's wrongs
And when that's done, I'll divorce my Muse,
Fire my clerk, and love only youse.

III

Hear Part III

Prekrasnaya dama
In Arcadia fuit
Now beneath the sea
In a Spanish castle
Built with hollow vowels
In the liquid air
(I love its lived-in look)

The Mystical Lady
Arose from the sea
And who is there to say
That even Aphrodite
Suffered no sea-change:
And Endymion
In all probability
Could not swim a stroke:
Puella mea docta
How came you to be
Whiter than a washed swan?

Prekrasnaya dama
Qui vivit et regnat
Without your father
Without your son
Not always secular
And not for all men.

Juliet
Juliet?
Haven't we met?
And you a Capulet
But we're young yet
We can forget.

Prekrasnaya dama
Under the gaslights
Luring the farmboys
Cynthia
Seducing
Shepherds.
Beatrice
Leading poets
Through the park
The long way round
To heaven.

Blanche fille aux cheveux roux
Dont la robe par ses trous
Laisse voir la pauvreté
Et la beauté
Is it sea-change
This strange
Metamorphosis
Or metempsychosis
Kept down by your heavy shoes
Did you walk with Endymion?

Most beautiful lady
Whose body's in heaven
And spirit's in the sea.
Prekrasnaya dama
Qui vivit et regnat . . .

My loveliest lover lives in the sea
In an old Spanish castle made of air
She sends me her love in the rhyming waves
The sea was the first of her poet-friends.

"I a poet---
Shouts the sea--
Was first to write--
Shouts the sea---
Words in the windswept sand.

"My words were life---
Shouts the sea---
Salty sea life---
Shouts the sea---
Loathe to live on land.

"The drying sun---
Shouts the sea---
Warms too much---
Shouts the sea---
And lights, and lights too much."

Thus spoke the sea in preface
To my darling's lovely message.

IV

Hear Part IV

"I am the lover
That you seek,
A Summery Eve

 
Before 
 
		 the
 
				Fall

When the sea became the fish's
And rising man reached the land
And left me lonely here below
Alone in the sea-changed sunlight

Warped to willowy beauty
Sun with sea a greenish swirling
Sea with sun dancing of diamonds
Perpetual glowing, always half-light
Never too bright obscuring
Beauty rippling radiumlike

C'est la mer mêlée au soleil:
This is the only eau-de-vie,
Undrinkable---like a poem
Where words like fishes
Swim in rhythmic sea-surge
Around an idea of Me
Lit in wondrous softlight
Quiet as the sea
Noisy as fishes.

"The sea is a poem
As well as a poet
Moving regularly
With life beneath.

"A poem is also a sea
My liquid land dwelling
One who drinks the sea
Becomes more thirsty,
Becomes parched and eventually
Dies, hallucinating.

I am the Lady of the Lake
Botticcelli's Venus
Sophia and the Sirens
I am old and ever new,
Told, but never known,
The ideal which is never real,
A substanceless spirit
Which casts a shadow
And my shadow is the sea.

"I am unforgettable and ungettable,
And most of all I'm sad."

Mon beau navire ô ma memoire
Avons-nous assez navigué
Dans une onde mauvaise à boire?

V

Hear Part V

(We poets in our youth)

On the shore, sitting on a rock
Playing the cello

Thassa notta
Wayya playya sonata

The conductor brings his hands down the orchestra starts
And the music, like turning on the radio

Enda the trio
Allegro con brio!

Can you look at a cello without laughing? Yet it sounds
Sad, and that's its métier, as the French say.

(Begin in gladness)

My cello sinks in the sand
The tide is coming in
There's water under the bridge

Notta so loud--pp! Think
Youlla drive me ta drink!

Blame not my lute
Or cello,if you will,
Though my songs be somewhat strange

I give up
I go filla my cup

Slowly and softly
Can one ever escape
This tragic seascape?

(But thereof come in the end)

A coda
And I'll use my cadenza
With a perverse dissonant twang

Because he is gone
It's art's decline, my son
Whatever it is, it's fun

And consoling:
It's difficult to kiss in diving gear
Though the world is dry, it's here

And the tide goes out
With a couple of tears
Though I've kept my cello
As a talisman of doubt

(Despondency and madness)

He who C-sharp
Must B-flat

)Winks(

© Tom Ryan