The Widow's Jazz
by Mina Loy
The white flesh quakes to the negro soul
Chicago! Chicago!
An uninterpretable wail
stirs in a tangle of pale snakes
to the lethargic ecstasy of steps
backing into primeval goal
White man quit his actin' wise
colored folk hab de moon in dere eyes
Haunted by wind instruments
in groves of grace
the maiden saplings
slant to the oboes
and shampooed gigolos
prowl to the sobbing taboos.
An electric crown
crashes the furtive cargoes of the floor.
the pruned contours
dissolve
in the brazen shallows of dissonance
revolving mimes
of the encroaching Eros
in adolescence
The black brute-angels
in their human gloves
bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks
and impish musics
crumble the ecstatic loaf
before a swooning flock of doves.
Cravan
colossal absentee
the substitute dark
rolls to the incandescent memory
of love's survivor
on this rich suttee
seared by the flames of sound
the widowed urn
holds impotently
your murdered laughter
Husband
how secretly you cuckold me with death
while this cajoling jazz
blows with its tropic breath
among the echoes of the flesh
a synthesis
of racial caress
The seraph and the ass
in this unerring esperanto
of the earth
converse
of everlit delight
as my desire
receded
to the distance of the dead
searches
the opaque silence
of unpeopled space.