Mina Loy




Human Cylinders

The human cylinders 
Revolving in the enervating dust 
That wraps each closer in the mystery 
Of singularity 
Among the litter of a sunless afternoon 
Having eaten without tasting 
Talked without communion 
And at least two of us 
Loved a very little 
Without seeking 
To know if our two miseries 
In the lucid rush-together of automatons 
Could form one opulent wellbeing 

Simplifications of men 
In the enervating dusk 
Your indistinctness 
Serves me the core of the kernel of you 
When in the frenzied reaching out of intellect to intellect 
Leaning brow to brow       communicative 
Over the abyss of the potential 
Concordance of respiration 
Shames 
Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory 
And reciprocity 
Of conception 
And expression 
Where each extrudes beyond the tangible 
One thin pale trail of speculation 
From among us we have sent out 
Into the enervating dusk 
One little whining beast 
Whose longing 
Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow 
And one elastic tentacle of intuition 
To quiver among the stars 

The impartiality of the absolute 
Routs      the polemic 
Or which of us 
Would not 
Receiving the holy-ghost 
Catch it      and caging 
    Lose it 
Or in the problematic 
Destroy the Universe 
With a solution