These Poems Are Dedicated to
CARLO DE FORNARO
Who Was the First to Understand, Appreciate and
Sympathize with Them
OF THIS FIRST EDITION OF SIX-HUNDRED AND
FIFTY COPIES OF “THE SHADOW-EATER” BY
BENJAMIN DE CASSERES ONE-HUNDRED AND
FIFTY COPIES HAVE BEEN PRINTED ON TUSCANY
HAND MADE PAPER AND SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR
THE
SHADOW-EATER
BY
Benjamin De Casseres
NEW YORK
WILMARTH PUBLISHING COMPANY
1917
Copyright, 1915
By ALBERT & CHARLES BONI
Copyright, 1917
Assigned to WILMARTH PUBLISHING COMPANY
CONTENTS
THE PROTAGONIST
To Carlo de Fornaro.
Medusa! I go toward you smiling, serene; my will is granite to your stare, and I have that within me which blows out the light of hells set there within your eyes and turns to mottled stone the serpents on your head.
I have woven of my pains a masque of bronze and the summits of my deepest hells are changed into the impetuous lightnings of my will and claws of steel have come to grow upon my mutilated members.
I have violated my own graves and set the skeletons of my selves at my meal-less feasting board, and still found tender meat upon their bones, and the marrow of their ancient griefs was as hippocrene to me.
Eternity! Infinity! I come toward thee swifter than a thought of death! I come toward thee bulging like a woman in her ninth month!—bulging with my hells, my devils, my Gethsemanes, booty of my sullen pride!
TANTARA! TANTARO!
THE TONGUELESS ONE
THE SHRINE IN THE MIST
I peer at you, O glutton, well-fed, nigger-hipped, bag-eyed; at you I am peering,
And wonder whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of your belly—
Wondering whether the Truth be not a belch and a leer and a lusty young wench.
And I peer at you, too, O Gautama, the purpled renunciant, great Shadow-Eater:
I peer at you there on the roadside, where you sit ’neath the Bo tree, motionless, graven as death, solved in thy pulseless Nirvana—
Wondering whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of thy brain.
Am I mocked? Am I followed? Who goes there?
Hands off! thou Vile Thing!
Thou knowest not me nor the thing that I seek:
The Shrine that is set in a mist—over THERE, just BEYOND.
MY COMIC PERSPECTIVE
Well, here am I now, a butt-end, awaiting translation.
The world I have found a small box with endless false bottoms;
I have come to the tomb, a little clay box which, too, is false bottomed:
I call into it, laugh and halloo, “Come, TO-MORROW!”
THE PEEPER
THE-CIRCLE-THAT-LOOKS-LIKE-A-LINE
Briskly Man in his morn steps forth, guards up.
He bows, he smiles, and his eyes, foci of his myriad lusts, seek in the dust for the thing that slipped, eel-like, through his fingers in the yesterday.
At night, within his locked and barred room, his hope-fattened face dismantles.
His eyes grow knotted troubled lights, jaws sag—weary, oh, weary is he!
Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!
Youth! Youth! how gay his step!
His soul scents Truth—he is off like a hound on the trail, white brow upturned, the old ecstatic urge in his eye:
His hands would hook her now!
Up! Up! he reaches and steps off the precipice of the world.
A Hag bends over him, a Hag whose face is a lutescent leer, eyes steel-grayed by a knowledge of the pitiless truths.
Eternity rings with her glee-shrieks as she gathers his bones—bones that shall feed her quenchless immemorial fires in the nether hollows—
Hollows of the mocking shapes,
Hollows of metallic laughs,
Hollows of the wan gray spectres.
Pain! Pain! gay-pain! I watch, I record, in the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line!
Yea, I am the lidless, dispassionate Eye that pierces the murk and the mist—
My tears are a laughing,
My laughing a weeping—
I watch and I wait and record,
Brooding over my soul, that dried lava-stream and granary of volcanic dust;
Brooding over my brain, that mirror of the implacable trivial.
I am a shadow that is more real than a substance,
Am skewered and pinioned to offal—yet my soul is a
Kremlin of unapprehended magnificence,
The Vision Malefic and the Vision Beatific, too.
I live and am not, am the Infinite withered to naught.
I watch, I record, and I weave at Eternity’s looms the Circle-that-looks-like-a-line.
MY DIVINE HATE
The world is the Temple of Pain grounded and mortised in lies—
And that which they have told you is good I say is maggoty with lies.
Hope is a whore and love is a lie and a flea has more for his labor than a man, the wisest of whom is still earth’s awkward buffoon.
To-morrow is God—they have added a jot to Eternity!
Know they not to-day is Eternity and to-morrow its lewd, beckoning shadow?
And love they have sanctified because of its delicate tickle.
Pah! this rotten old breeding-patch circling the sun!
From the center to circumference, from nadir to zenith,
I, the eel that slips through the Great Bungler’s hands, survey and judge and cannot be lured by these old temporal cozzeners.
Yea, forever I vanish, I change, yet forever stand firm,
Flying the flag of Rebellion from the Temple of Pain, knowing the Thing that skulks in the adytum.
THE ROTTED IDEAL
THE VISION MALEFIC
DYING
O Life, thou plunderer,
Sly in thy cozzening, fell in thy lusts, weaver of nightmares, liar and cheat,
Here is thy last mockery,
Here is thy quarry: hast signalled the worms even now?
Swift be thy flight, thou craven and satyr and old purpled lust!
THE DEAD WHO LIVE
EXVOLVED
THE GOD OF NEGATION
GODWARD
Thou shalt love thyself more than thy neighbor.
Sound trumpet, thrust rapier, cleave unto thyself: self-ward we go, godhood be ours!
Unique in all time is my unquotable self: God in the dungeon of me, fear-shackled, thonged in the cords of the past.
Into the light at this moment, thou long-buried ONE; sternly, defiantly, joyously, I lift Thee into the light!
Long hast thou lain in crypts, and thy eyes are still closed; mute is God’s tongue, as silent as dreams.
Sound trumpet, thrust rapier, I cleave to myself, though spiked to a cross and rabbled by Doubt!
BEYOND SENSE
THE CYNIC OF NAZARETH
Hail! passionate rebel, great anarch of Nazareth, slitter of masks, announcer of Self procreate from a self—
Halloo! Halloo! from me to thee.
Sombre in hate, clear-eyed, dawn-browed, a mock in thy soul,
A mock at psalter and sceptre and a sneer for the sickly old God in the temples of stone—
Hail! Cynic and Mocker of Nazareth: greeting from me to thee!
DE PROFUNDIS
My being’s at nadir,
I pass into my solstice,
I have touched of ITS garment, the black thing IT weaves on ITS sentient looms, ITS great blouse of black which encircles the world fold upon fold—
While we crawl in ITS creases and guess.
Sit I in the night of ITS sleeve,
Withering into eternities,
Bowed in ITS night, in ITS night!
ON A MARRIAGE
O thou sweet dweller in the White Temple,
Baby! Baby! as yet a lustful dream in two human hearts!
Already thy white robes are stained by a tiny red mark—
Thou art doomed to enter the lazarhouse.
Baby! Baby! I hear thee in the night weeping and wailing ’gainst thy birth:
For another marriage is made.
THE SYNCOPATED SPINNER
LOVE AND SLEEP
THE WATCHER
Surge around me, ye humans, ye water-gymnasts;
The tide’s running out, the present is ever-dissolving and the morn bringeth death to ye all.
But I who plash in the eternal waters and stray to the pallid horizon
Will return on the day of your silence, the Same, ever the Same.
FACE TO FACE
MY SHADOWS
THE VIGIL
THE CLOSED ROOM
HALF-SEEN
THE LONG VIGIL
PROPHETIC
Life I have bosomed in a sigh.
I will exhale with the dawn, step lightly to my zenith, death in-wrapt.
RESURRECTION NIGHT
The subtle fingers of the dawn brushed my brow and my soul flowed back into the sluiceways of the old familiar world;
But long I laid in wonder staring at the wall, for in that night I had again become the Things I was before my birth.
And Terror and Guilt were old shapes of me.
BIRD OF THE NIGHT
THE CLEFT IN THE WALL
I travelled far with my pickaxe and spade and spied by chance a tiny cleft in Time’s granite wall—
I called it the NOW;
And through it I peeped like a boy through a knot-hole,
Peeped into the Infinite, a sea no bigger than a dewdrop, placid and waveless and spaceless.
(What Giant Shape lay therein, the opening and shutting of whose eyes gendered immeasureable cycles?)
I passed through the cleft of the NOW with infinite labor, and dispersed body and soul,
And cities and women and autumnal skies drift past my sight and leave me untouched.
THE TRUANT
In the immobile immensities, where renascence and decay and the plexed dream called Life were still unsensed—
Before I aggregated,
Before I anealed into an I,
Before the first stratum of lust was laid,
Before the dispart from the ALL—
In the immobile immensities something was ordered of me;
I was sent on an errand!
Hey ho! I have dallied with mortals too long,
Yet I dare not return without the thing done.
Or was it—No! No! too horrible!
CHANGE AND AN ENDING
THE QUEST IN THE FLESH
War! War!—bring me helmet and shield and the sword of the spirit; the great weaponed SELF that I seek and that forever seeks me
Is shut in a tower of gold o’ergrown with weeds and the rank, poisonous fungi of outworn selves,
And here, gripped in these forces elemental, I make a passionate compact with my dumb, brutish instincts
To assail every live-dead thing that hinders my march to that tower of gold, o’ergrown, untended, unkenned;
And there in the winds, in a fury of battle, deliver the SELF in the light of the sun—
SELF that shall live to its uttermost transfigured instinct,
SELF that am God of all gods.
IN THE ADYTUM
What finger-marks these on the white knob of my door?
Narrow, black finger-prints, telltale of thinkers and ghosts,
Or maybe somnambules who have walked out of the world,
Or he, beloved of my soul: Has he called?—where loafed I then?
Who wills may enter,
But none have I seen—
Seen enter the door that’s ajar,
The door of my soul swung on the hinges of doubt.
THE WAY OUT: BIO.
MOTH-TERROR
MY HOLY LUST
THE OVERONE
THE ULTIMATE
THE SLEEPER
THE ALLEYS OF ELD
LOVE THE DESTROYER
I reject Love—
Love that has strewn millions of Me along the path I upclomb, shredded my flesh with its claws and burnt out my brains in its long searing clutch.
Through that ageless black night, with my earth-itch fair full upon me, once my Eye was stabbed by a bolt from the fulgurant Light and my soul pined away from its love and grew strong in its terrible Nay.
I reject Love—
Love that accouched every star in the blue, that with knout of Desire sends the young worlds grunting round and round the senescent, suns.
I hear swash and lave of the unimagined fulgurant Light, burning sure and serene at the Axis of things—soft swash and soft lave wrought in the great Mnemonic Cell-Soul of me!
REJECTION
THE SPEAR OF THE GREAT SPURNING
New York City, 1902-1906.