Modernist Poems

Elizabeth Robinson

Madame Blavatsky to Robert McAlmon

I prefer you skeptics to the credulous ones. You

have a more fulfilled sense of silence. Those who

claim that my chamber was equipped with trap

doors amuse, even excite

me. That’s your mode of gift, is it

not? Gossip? The aggregate of your disbelief

mutes the generosity behind it. You’ve heard

the term “clairaudience”? The ability to

receive messages through the ear? The voices

arrive with their own suggestions. They teach

by the Socratic method, plying questions which,

like you, I decline to answer. The lengthy pause

is what they are after, their medium, so that

long after you and I are banished inside that intermission

we’ll still be geniuses together.

Pamela Colman Smith and Havelock Ellis

She dreams that there is a blister of dried skin on her forearm, and 
when she tries to rub it off, it opens as a flower, still soft and dry, layer 
after layer opening up. 

Each layer she tries to scratch away and

so forth.

She hums: “I am speaking of course of myself.”

He arranges her bare limbs, bending the knees and angling them away from
her pelvis, then steps back to look. From the horizon, her legs form an M.
So he tells her.

“But I am not an M.” “At the crux of the M,” he explains, cupping her vulva, “this is your mandorla.
Do you know this word?”

“I’ll investigate it.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Temperance,” she comments.

His gaze lowers.

“Not abstinence,” she clarifies, “but what is poured between two vessels, all
tempered by their conjoining.”

She has had a dream in which “biting one’s tongue” means to remove 
it as a parcel from one’s mouth and to stuff it with its own content.

Romaine Brooks Evading Natalie Barney

Does a painting have a protagonist or only a subject?

She knows too well about being subject.

There’s a little, purpling deity being rubbed as sand
into the muscle of the breast.

There’s a sibling rivalry sans sibling.

She knows that haunted houses are banal.

An auto-portrait, where the subject is the doctor of the protagonist.

A sibling rivalry where the sibling has been effaced.

One is an only child and the other is not.

The painting suffers its own apparitions, but only just.
As with all runaways, they are forced back to the fold.

The physician claims that death reversed is inertia, petrifaction,
somnambulism.

This was death footnoted, in which two sisters become lovers.

Their intimacy is the measure of the protagonist, in whose beloved is begun an

absence that exceeds conception, also known as the self-same.

In other words, the ghost was bottom heavy, a sleepwalker after all.

The Baroness Elsa Haranguing W. B. Yeats

As for myself, I am a patriot of the body, but we each speak with an accent.

Brevity has not been my strong suit, nor yours,

but let our prolixity make us to fly as the crow

flies, transceptual, over each our allegiance

to impulse, vision, the carnal insight that makes a citizen.

I restate citizenship as

an ultimate penury,

as you must know, and as

the anatomy of

the absurd:

my skull lacquered and your male parts

sewn together with monkey glands,

though perhaps these are traitorous forms,

these bodies who breed us in countries, who

sign us to pacts, we,

in our ludicrous uniforms.

Amy Lowell Drowsing while
Antonin Artaud Picks Her Pocket

I love you perhaps enough

not to caricature you, as I love

your sodden pockets, planted, a mess, with the detritus of wealth, wriggling

with blooms. Your American garden, I hear,

is extraordinary enough that the posies cry from across the ocean

when I take

my leave of you. A magic cane that crooks into

your possession to break my body and put it back together like stems who

decapitate their blooms.

Your fattened body is its own locket, and I rub my gaze across its interior

leaving my death portrait enclosed for you to discover.

It is not the image of me, but a “pattern”—all right,

a joke at your expense. An asylum in which I am safe to

offend your proprieties, as sleeping, you are the actress

I covet most. A genteel lump made of knuckles.

Mina Loy and Oscar Wilde

I’m running quite late, harried by my own exile.

I suspect

you’ll expect me

to say so prettily, or

at least smartly, but the quip will no longer do. When

the boat sailed round the bend, it was

inevitable that onlookers

would foresee it reaching

its destination. And now we know

that destination is the quip, the

brilliant element, the horizon that

can be folded handily,

crowning the daylight like a lampshade—

Glare.

Lost jest on

the rough

wave we thought would return

our wits to us.

Sigmund Freud Thinking about Bryher

I think of islands.

Here is a place that is not a place,

and a refugee adopts a name, a code,

a symptom, just as an island

is a symptom

of the landmass that once attached to it.

Far beneath the horizon, the water suggests,

the island extends like a trauma

through the sea.

At its base: We do not know.

It is not a science, this passage to neutrality.

The island is not a surety, it is a symptom, a beneficent symptom.