Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Alfred Kreymborg, ed. Others for 1919. 1920.

Emanuel Carnevali

The Apprentice

JUST as the passing wind

catches the word of the glittering leaves,

I’d make your curled lips tingle

with a swift kiss—should you let me.

Instead,

you see me bent and doubled up

by silence

in silence

and my words are harsh,

sounds of a body that breaks.

You turn your wide eyes,

ever bewildered,

bewildered as the sun when it glances

its first glance on the lake, at dawn,

you see all things with newness,

you see all,

all but my love.

Well, that’s how it goes, eh, Annie?

All but my clumsy, self-accursed love

under my bent and folded

body,

body awe-full of raptures,

awe-full of the tree-tops and leaves skipping, snapping

under those clouds,—

clouds that the moon is kissing

over my silent head.

That’s how things go and that’s

precisely how things should go—

that’s how the wind presses our cheeks a moment

and slips

behind us away, it’s how

it stretches a ribbon over our eyelids

and pulls it from behind, it’s my heels pounding the side-walk;

it’s how things go, the way

they happen,

the morning, the evening and night—

how they come and they go and are going

and linger,

it’s love that comes and love

that does not come.

I’ll say no hands

will know your hands as mine do,

your hands that are soft as the grass is.

But there’s no answer coming

to me, so

don’t worry, Annie.

Don’t worry, wide round eyes.

Do turn around and

around, wide round eyes,

and soft slender hands do whisper

of easy happiness and of a young

motherliness,

and you, dear child, do say,

do say and repeat,

do repeat most vigorously

that you don’t love me.

I have today again uncovered the sky and have found it

ever so cool and ever so new, under.

I wait for no answer, and no thing

to ask, and no thing

to say, besides what you know and I know

and that which

to the end of days

will have one and an only

meaning

and no meaning

and all meanings and

the

meaning.

You think you can leave the matter to your lips

and they don’t work right

and then

it’s two deadmen shaking hands

saying “Howdydo Sir?”

Come on, don’t be afraid you’ll spoil me

if you light the gas in your room

and show me

that you have heard my cries.

Are you so poor in kisses

that you’re so stingy with them;

and is your heart so ravaged

that you won’t let me pick there

one or two flowers?…

Oh, never mind what I’ll do with them!

I’m going to teach you yet

what rapture is.

I play my serenade

beating my clenched fist

on a gong and a drum.

What I want is to give you

the sound of what a man is.

I love my eyes and lips

better than yours;

besides, the dampness of the night

pierces my shoes.

I can be as capricious

as you can be, don’t worry!

Come on, open that window

or I’ll go home.