ADVICE

NEW POETRY
FALL, 1920

OCTOBER

By Robert Bridges

THE FORERUNNER

By Kahlil Gibran

WORDSWORTH: AN ANTHOLOGY

By R. Cobden-Sanderson

ADVICE

By Maxwell Bodenheim

ADVICE

A BOOK OF POEMS

By MAXWELL BODENHEIM

NEW YORK
ALFRED·A·KNOPF
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MINNA
WHOSE SMILE IS MY THRONE

Some of the poems which compose this book have appeared in the Yale Review, the Smart Set, the New Republic, Reedy’s Mirror, the Dial, the Touchstone, the Little Review, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the Century, and the New York Tribune. They are good, in spite of their numerous appearances.

CONTENTS

ADVICE

ADVICE TO A STREET-PAVEMENT

Lacerated grey has bitten

Into your shapeless humility.

Little episodes of roving

Strew their hieroglyphics on your muteness.

Life has given you heavy stains

Like an ointment growing stale.

Endless feet tap over you

With a maniac insistence.

O unresisting street-pavement,

Keep your passive insolence

At the dwarfs who scorn you with their feet.

Only one who lies upon his back

Can disregard the stars.

ADVICE TO A BUTTER-CUP

Undistinguished butter-cup

Lost among myriads of others,

To the red ant eyeing you

You are giant stillness.

He pauses on the boulder of a clod,

Baffled by your nearness to the sky.

But to the black loam at your feet

You are the atom of a pent-up dream.

Undistinguished butter-cup,

Take your little breath of contemplation,

Undisturbed by haughty tricks of space.

ADVICE TO A RIVER STEAM-BOAT

The brass band plays upon your decks,

Like a sturdy harlot aping mirth,

And people in starched shields

Stuff their passions with sweet words,

Life is swishing in the air,

Like a tipsy, unseen bridegroom.

O humbly grunting river boat,

Take the churning water and the sun

Like one who plays with his own chains

And flings their turmoil to the sky.

Only a voice can leap above high walls.

FOUNDRY WORKERS

Brown faces twisted back

Into an ecstasy of tight resistance;

Eyes that are huge sweat drops

Unheeded by the struggle underneath them—

Throughout the night you stagger under walls

Where life is squeezed to squealing bitterness.

Beneath your heaving flash of limbs

Your thoughts are smashed to a dejected trance

And you are swept, like empty mites,

Into a glistening frenzy of motion....

Yet, on a Sunday afternoon

I have seen you straightening your backs with slow smiles;

Walking through the streets

And patiently groping for lost outlines.

Your lips were placid bruises

Almost fearing to relax,

And often out upon some green

Your legs swung themselves into long lost shapes.

Perhaps upon your death-beds

You will lift your hands, with a wraith of grace,

Showing life a last, weak curve

Of the rhythm he could not kill.

ADVICE TO A HORNÈD TOAD

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

Rock souls have dwindled to your eyes

And thrown a splintered end upon your blood.

Night and day have vanished

To you, who squat and watch

Years loosen one sand grain until

Its fall becomes your moment.

Tall things plunge over you,

Slashing their dreams with motion

That holds the death of all they seek,

But you, to whom fierce winds are ripples,

Do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness.

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

Never hop from your grey rock crevice

Mute with interwoven beginnings and ends.

The fluid lies of motion

Leave no remembrance behind.

ADVICE TO A FOREST

O trees, to whom the darkness is a child

Scampering in and out of your long, green beards;

O trees, to whom sunlight is a tattered pilgrim

Counting his dreams within your hermitage

And slipping down the road, in twilight robes;

O trees, whose leaves make an incense of sound

Reeling with the beat of your caught feet,

Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred,

When little men come to fell you.

These men will saw you into strips

Of pointed brooding, blind with paint,

But underneath you men will chase

The grey staccato of their lives

Down a glaring maze of walls

Much harder than your own.

And when, at last, the deep brown gaze

Of stolidly amorous time steals over you,

The little men who bit into your hearts

Will stray off in a patter of rabbits’ feet.

Look down upon these children then

With the aloof and weary tolerance

That all still things possess,

O trees, to whom the darkness was a child

Scampering in and out of your long, green beards.

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE I

Rounded to a wide eyed clownishness

Crowned by the shifting bravado

Of his long, brown ears,

The rabbit peeked at the sky.

To him, the sky seemed an angelic

Pasture stripped to phantom tranquility,

Where one could nibble thoughtfully.

He longed to leave his mild furtiveness

And speak to a boldness puzzled by his flesh.

With one long circle of despairing grace

He flashed into the air,

Leaping toward his heaven.

But down he crashed against a snake

Who ate him with a meditative interest.

From that day on the snake was filled

With little, meek whispers of concern.

The crushed and peaceful rabbit’s dream

Cast a groping hush upon his blood.

He curled inertly on a rock,

In cryptic, wilted savageness.

In the end, his dry, grey body

Was scattered out upon the rock,

Like a story that could not be told.

ADVICE TO A BLUE-BIRD

Who can make a delicate adventure

Of walking on the ground?

Who can make grass-blades

Arcades for pertly careless straying?

You alone, who skim against these leaves,

Turning all desire into light whips

Moulded by your deep blue wing-tips,

You who shrill your unconcern

Into the sternly antique sky.

You to whom all things

Hold an equal kiss of touch.

Mincing, wanton blue-bird,

Grimace at the hoofs of passing men.

You alone can lose yourself

Within a sky, and rob it of its blue!

TO A FRIEND

Your head is steel cut into drooping lines

That make a mask satirically meek:

Your face is like a tired devil weak

From drinking many vague and unsought wines.

The sullen skepticism of your eyes

For ever trying to transcend itself,

Is often entered by a wistful elf

Who sits naïvely unperturbed and wise.

And this same remnant, with its youthful wiles

Held curiously apart from blasphemies,

Twirls starlight shivers out upon your sneers

And changes them to little, startled smiles.

And all your insolence drops to its knees

Before the half-won grandeur of past years.

ADVICE TO A WOMAN

The sloping lines of your shoulders

Speak of Chinese pagodas.

They clash with your western face

Where child and courtesan

Clasp each other in a feigned embrace.

Life, to you, is a liquid mirror.

You stand with delicate, perpetual amazement,

Vainly seeking your reflection.

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE II

August sauntered down the mountain-side,

Dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay.

The air was like an old priest

Disrobing without embarrassment

Before the dark and candid gaze of night.

But these things brought no pause

To the saucily determined squirrel.

His eyes were hungrily upturned

To where the stars hung—icily clustered nuts

Dotting trees of solitude.

He saw the stars just over the horizon,

And they seemed to grow

On trees that he could reach.

So he scampered on, from branch to branch,

Wondering why the fairy nut-trees

Ran away from him.

But, looking down, he spied

A softly wild cheeked mountain pool,

And there a handful of fairy nuts

Bit into the indigo cupping them.

With a squeal of weary happiness

The squirrel plunged into the mountain pool,

And as he drowned within its soundless heart

The fairy nuts were jigging over him,

Like the unheard stirring of a poem.

ADVICE TO A BUTTERFLY

Aimless petal of the wind,

Spinning gently weird circles,

To the flowers underneath

You are a drunken king of motion;

To the plunging winds above

You are momentary indecision.

Aimless petal of the wind,

Waver carelessly against this June.

The universe, like you, is but

The drowsy arm of stillness

Spinning gently weird circles in his sleep.

ADVICE TO A POOL

Be a liquid threshold for the dawn

And let night touch you with his back.

The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds

Are only pause and rhythm

Within an endless fantasy,

But you, like they, can be

A dream from the loins of a dream,

And build a golden stairway of escape.

O coolly unperturbed pool,

Slap your ripples in laughter at men,

Who splash you with their lordly hands.

Time is but a phantom dagger

That motion lifts to slay itself.

WHEN FOOLS DISPUTE

A trickle of dawn insinuated itself

Through the crevices of black satiation.

The elderly trees coughed, lightly, hurriedly,

In remonstrance against the invasion.

Lean with a virginal poison,

The grass-blades shook, immune to light and time.

A bird lost in a tree

Shrilly flirted with its energy....

One fool, in the garden, spoke to another.

ADVICE TO A GRASS-BLADE

Thin and dark green symbol

Of an earth forever raising

Myriads of chained wings,

Breezes have a form, to you,

And sounds break into vivid shape.

The proud finality of tiny sight

Cannot lure your pliant blindness.

Thin and dark green blade,