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fucking poets 2
Fucking Shakespeare
(in an upstairs room of the White Bacon Inn at Mortlake, at lunch)
'O Will,' (I mewed whilst he unstrung my partlet
to suck upon my first nipple) 'this be
a Play In Five Acts ?'
'Marry,' he replied, gaspynge as a man on a pipe,
' 'tis but a prologue to a prologue,
and all will be brief.'
Indeed, by the mallow candle we were about it
as long as a jig.
The door lay open, and the world passynge by
with only the noises of laughter and slippers.
He did not wish me naked, and told me that
his own clothes were too turbinated to remove in time.
Indeed, his horn barely surpassed
the pullings-out of his gallyhose.
But his shirte was opened upon the haires of his breast
and he smelled sweetly of bergamot.
Sunlight came twice into the roome,
making a cross upon the wall
more yellow than a canary.
W. said he had not imagined a canary cross.
With each suddene blowe of the horn, and this was not many,
he exclaimed, 'Oof, oof, oof, oof,'
which I took for, 'If, if, if, if,'
which disconcerted me into a world of possibilities.
Indeed, if the sun breeds atomies in a box,
then we were amidst the silent agitations of the world.
He died in the air at his own hand
in a faire fountain of spunk
that I would fain have drunk at.
Here, an orange rolled into our room.
I believe that W. may absorb the world,
for it was not there when I left.
He lay in my lap after (for certainly not I in his)
for only a hastie minute.
'I cannot beare to be still,' he said.
I heard outside the clyppynge of hedges,
the cry of sparrows, and the drip of water
in the knotte-garden beyond the lawn.
'Ah,' he cried, as he laced back his shirt and shoon,
'I am born too thin, and the world entereth,
and I cannot keep from its rayes.'
Indeed, when I asked him why he carried his knife
always about him, he said that it was
to cut himself free of the world
when it sucked him.
'If I linger at Beauty or Endeavour,
I am struck downe by the fullnesse of Meaning.'
I heard him hasten down the staircase
in a tarantelle of heels.
I had forgot to ask him to sign my erse.
written after, at a hut upon St Arnaud, in the south island of New Zealand
Next Week : Fucking Edward Fitzgerald
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