Advice: A Book of Poems. Maxwell Bodenheim

butter-cup,

      Take your little breath of contemplation,

      Undisturbed by haughty tricks of space.

ADVICE TO A RIVER STEAM-BOAT

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      The brass band plays upon your decks,

      Like a sturdy harlot aping mirth,

      And people in starched shields

      Stuff their passions with sweet words,

      Life is swishing in the air,

      Like a tipsy, unseen bridegroom.

      O humbly grunting river boat,

      Take the churning water and the sun

      Like one who plays with his own chains

      And flings their turmoil to the sky.

      Only a voice can leap above high walls.

FOUNDRY WORKERS

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      Brown faces twisted back

      Into an ecstasy of tight resistance;

      Eyes that are huge sweat drops

      Unheeded by the struggle underneath them—

      Throughout the night you stagger under walls

      Where life is squeezed to squealing bitterness.

      Beneath your heaving flash of limbs

      Your thoughts are smashed to a dejected trance

      And you are swept, like empty mites,

      Into a glistening frenzy of motion. …

      Yet, on a Sunday afternoon

      I have seen you straightening your backs with slow smiles;

      Walking through the streets

      And patiently groping for lost outlines.

      Your lips were placid bruises

      Almost fearing to relax,

      And often out upon some green

      Your legs swung themselves into long lost shapes.

      Perhaps upon your death-beds

      You will lift your hands, with a wraith of grace,

      Showing life a last, weak curve

      Of the rhythm he could not kill.

ADVICE TO A HORNÈD TOAD

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      Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

      Rock souls have dwindled to your eyes

      And thrown a splintered end upon your blood.

      Night and day have vanished

      To you, who squat and watch

      Years loosen one sand grain until

      Its fall becomes your moment.

      Tall things plunge over you,

      Slashing their dreams with motion

      That holds the death of all they seek,

      But you, to whom fierce winds are ripples,

      Do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness.

      Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

      Never hop from your grey rock crevice

      Mute with interwoven beginnings and ends.

      The fluid lies of motion

      Leave no remembrance behind.

ADVICE TO A FOREST

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      O trees, to whom the darkness is a child

      Scampering in and out of your long, green beards;

      O trees, to whom sunlight is a tattered pilgrim

      Counting his dreams within your hermitage

      And slipping down the road, in twilight robes;

      O trees, whose leaves make an incense of sound

      Reeling with the beat of your caught feet,

      Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred,

      When little men come to fell you.

      These men will saw you into strips

      Of pointed brooding, blind with paint,

      But underneath you men will chase

      The grey staccato of their lives

      Down a glaring maze of walls

      Much harder than your own.

      And when, at last, the deep brown gaze

      Of stolidly amorous time steals over you,

      The little men who bit into your hearts

      Will stray off in a patter of rabbits’ feet.

      Look down upon these children then

      With the aloof and weary tolerance

      That all still things possess,

      O trees, to whom the darkness was a child

      Scampering in and out of your long, green beards.

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE I

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      Rounded to a wide eyed clownishness

      Crowned by the shifting bravado

      Of his long, brown ears,

      The rabbit peeked at the sky.

      To him, the sky seemed an angelic

      Pasture stripped to phantom tranquility,

      Where one could nibble thoughtfully.

      He longed to leave his mild furtiveness

      And speak to a boldness puzzled by his flesh.

      With one long circle of despairing grace

      He flashed into the air,

      Leaping toward his heaven.

      But down he crashed against a snake

      Who ate him with a meditative interest.

      From that day on the snake was filled

      With little, meek whispers of concern.

      The crushed and peaceful rabbit’s dream

      Cast a groping hush upon his blood.

      He curled inertly on a rock,

      In cryptic, wilted savageness.

      In the end, his dry, grey body

      Was scattered out upon the rock,

      Like a story that could not be told.

ADVICE TO A BLUE-BIRD