Pitie Pour Les Femmes

Marcia Nardi

PITIE POUR LES FEMMES

THESE mothering poodles in dark, too warm

Court bedrooms of a nice hotel,

And their nieces in Danville fleeing the vice

Of girls in prison via the touch

Of the boss‚s glance on their Nylon hose,

Have hardly helped her books to sell;

Nor those

As unsuspectingly betrayed,

On job-free timeless afternoons,

By Antoine‚s fingers in their hair

Into an infidelity to dreams

Patient and deft as a velvet rose;

Only god‚s lost

Incestuous daughters

Trained to a roué‚s flinching joys

Beneath their bodiless Father‚s whip

On benches pillowed by the chant

Of willing choir boys. . .

Not knowing that in her

The mind and flesh embrace each other,

Words yearning like breasts within a brain of stone˜

Thought‚s fine perceptions thickening to press

A cageless mirrored body to her own.

POEM

How difficult the erection of even

That fence of a hair‚s breadth

Between

Body and soul of another,

Whose presence crams

Ten worlds:

Like trying to keep entirely to the right

Or to the left, jostled,

On a city pavement;

Or on a country lane,

When letting a car pass,

Having

One foot upon grass

And another on gravel.

How easy the innocent saunter there

From adjoining room to room,

The simple bird-circuit

Of star and tree,

The sure amphibian stride

From the eye‚s deep to the causeway

Of coffee offered and sipped˜

With the highroad

Of what‚s unoffered or unwanted

Still a component.

But here within self˜

Ah the terror of that leap

From where the estranged and disemboweled

ache

Of the disciplined heart

Draws neatly as a magnet

The wrist-bone‚s secret pulse

And the blood‚s knee-reflex,

To where˜

Across the derangement of a sea-wide lake˜

The verbal journey‚s wind-up trains,

And the trained seal‚s handshake

Of life going on as usual,

Are marooned.

IN THE ASYLUM

IN the asylum

There was one

Who cried for matches

Stole them

Struck them all night long

In pity for long rows of flameless candles

Strangely melting down to death

With black unlighted wicks.

Branded at first as criminal˜

Incendiary,

He‚d later been discovered madman

(Concerned with wax not buildings)

By those away on yachts

Or in the surf

When summer evenings fill

The lacquered Woolworth candelabra

Of mean city streets

With yielding human tallow.

My heart pulled off on such a night

A hand, a mouth,

A look or two

As soft and warm

As drippings from a wake or Christmas taper

And so amenable to almost any simple dream

Of foam or ivy happiness

To which my fancy cared to shape them,

I also marveled not to find

An ikon flame or altar glow of any kind

Arising from the parent asking˜

Beheld as crazily its helpless core go down,

Without one gleaming cry or flickering prayer,

To now a fly-speck in the hardening of

The city poor‚s return

Each dawn

To a death for Marxist marble.

DEATH AT „BEDFORD"*

„Le vice est toujours sot. Ne le poetisez jamais."

˜G.A. at Women's Court

ANY she had loved had any loved her

Whose griefs were iron doves with hate for men,

Had one not taught her just enough of friendship

To make of all the rest soft dream again.

Fred, she whispers, Tom dear, Neddie, Richard,

But eyes might see her cheeks had lost their bloom

And disembodied arms reach out imploring

From every corner of the darkened room.

And who was Fred? We‚ll gladly send a letter:

The kindly priest has youth: it strangely lends

His offered crucifix the glint of coin˜

Turns Christ the giver waiving dividends.

And who was Tom? Your husband, son, your brother?

Could any two be claimed as mated hands,

Her breasts were sought perhaps. They touch her forehead:

Confused she lies like foam-abandoned sands.

*Bedford Reformatory where convicted prostitutes are imprisoned.

BOWERY

PLACE them too on your list of flyers

When your white thought, tolerance,

From this debris of men turns back˜

An empty and useless ambulance.

And how exclude them? The dream forgot˜

For some a hundredth agate stair

More easy going down than up,

Is also a topless cliff of air

With wings still needed for descent:

On those of bluster and alcohol

Oh see them laugh like a stunting plane. . .

Then like a doomed ship,

Fall.