Facsimile of a Waste Land
And if Another knows I have a little nut-tree cultivated indoors
I know that in this climate nothing will it bear
despite much watering with sighs and tears.
I know little of horticulture but a silver anguish
supplemented by sundry domestic details not Christmas tinselled
and a golden fear of succumbing to the violet typing-ribbon,
Who only know that in return for the kiss you gave to me,
not here, O, Adeimantus, but in another world,
there is no more noise now I hand you the fruit of
More than a year struggling with the violet and the orange peel
which is so alien to my little nut-tree embedded
in the present context of its final version.
______________
[V F-T’s ] Note: the lines:
“And if Another knows I know I know not
Who only know that there is no more noise now”
were omitted by Eliot from his final version, along with
“Not here, O, Adeimantus, but in another world”.
Pound was fond of using a violet typewriter ribbon.
Pastoral
They are our creatures, clover, and they love us
Through the long summer meadows’ diesel fumes.
Smooth as their scent and contours clear however
Less than enough to compensate for names.
Jagged are names and not our creatures
Either in kind or movement like the flowers.
Raised voices in a car or by a river
Remind us of the world that is not ours.
Silence in grass and solace in blank verdure
Summon the frightful glare of nouns and nerves.
The gentle foal linguistically wounded
Squeals like a car’s brakes
Like our twisted words.
Le Signe (Cygne)
Godard, the anthropological swan
floats on the Cam when day is done.
Levi-Strauss stands on a bridge and calls:
Birds love freedom; they build themselves homes;
They often engage in human relations.
Come Godard, come, here, Godard, here. The halls
of Clare and Trinity, John’s and Queens’
echo the sound with scraping of chairs
and cramming of maws. A red-gowned don
floats by the swan. We must try to explain
to the posturing dancers that this is an image
of human existence; this is the barre-work
of verbal behaviour; this knife in the corpse
that they shove through a window to float
down the Cam when day is done
is Godard, the anthropological swan.
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