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Home  »  Others for 1919  »  Synthesized Perfumes and Essences

Alfred Kreymborg, ed. Others for 1919. 1920.

Marsden Hartley

Synthesized Perfumes and Essences

MORNING comes with such rapidity, purple plum hanging on sensuous boughs over my head, sweeping my shoulders, grazing my cheek, that I wonder one ever thinks of the going of evening.

I never talk of evening save to say of it, it is another kind of light.

Dark holes called doorways are for me only as places to go into where one watches the light of night from them.

Danse l’Aigle—L’homme Rouge. As we watched him swinging and descending, we saw the dew of multiple benefactions dropping from his wings. In his beak he held fragments of the morning gathered from the lips of the red cliff nearest the sun of dawn.

How splendid he is, the lady from the fiord remarked. I stroked his wings and felt the warmth of the centuries on my hands.

It emphasized our infancy in point of time. It emphasized our vacuity in point of experience.

There is room on the housetops for love. There is room over the housetops for the moon to rise and resume the old eloquence.

If there is anything for lovers in the rising of the moon, they will be welcome to the supposition. The sky has time for nothing but approval, of all things, that are trivial.

Against the long thin sky of our wilfulness, there hangs the marriage pear. If brown hands wish to make a syrinx out of olive boughs,

What is the objection? The wood is oiled for music.

Someone will be in love with someone, despite a certain prejudice.

The weevil falls to dust with every suit of clothes. If the gem is hard, it is rather sure of retaining its accustomed radiance.

Water running beside my bed. The brook brought to my bedside.

The little pool, when the tide is out. Anemones and crabs at home.

Violet and orange. Indian orange. Roseate, ashy gold.

Seaweeds made of torments rolling out of brown eyes.

Froth from the tossed wave. My bedlinen shall be made of it.

The window nearest my bed shall be made of forsaken cusps of the moon.

I shall sleep, with an orange, a lemon, and an avocado on a little table.

A silver plate with the red seeds of the pomegranate divested of their juices. A pampas plume shall wave with the breath of nightingales from a distant orchard. I think I could care for such a sleep. For once, at least.