Nga-a-a-a-a, sang the pig, Goya holding it up by the spigot on its back before the circle of dirty-faced children … Goya drew a pig on a wall … The five-year-old hairdresser’s son … saw, graved on a silver tray … the lion: and sunsets were begun … Goya smelt the bull-fight blood: The pupil of the Carmelite … Gave his hands to a goldsmith, learned: to gild an aureole aright … Goya saw the Puzzel’s eyes: … sang in the street: (with a guitar) and climbed the balcony; but Keats (under the halyards) wrote “Bright Star” … Goya saw the Great Slut pick The chirping human puppets up. And laugh, with pendulous mountain lip, And drown them in a coffee cup; Or squeeze their little juices out In arid hands, insensitive, To make them gibber … Goya went Among the catacombs to live … He saw gross Ronyans of the air, harelipped and goitered, raped in flight By hairless pimps, umbrella-winged: Tumult above Madrid at night … He HEARD the SECONDS IN his CLOCK CRACK like SEEDS, DIVULGE and POUR aBYSmal FILTH of NOthingNESS BETWEEN the PENdulum AND the FLOOR: Torrents of dead veins, rotted cells, Tonsils decayed, and fingernails: Dead hair, dead fur, dead claws, dead skin. Nostrils and lids; and cauls and veils; And EYES that still, in death, remained (Unlidded and unlashed) AWARE of the foul CORE, and, fouler yet, The REGION WORM that RAVINS There … STENCH flowed out of the second’s TICK. And Goya swam with it through SPACE, Sweating the fetor from his limbs. And stared upon the UNFEATURED FACE That did not see, and sheltered NAUGHT, but WAS and IS. The second gone, Goya returned, and drew the FACE; And scrawled beneath it, “This I have known” … And drew four slatterns, in an attic, Heavy, with heads on arms, asleep: And underscribed it. “Let them slumber! Who, if they woke, could only weep” … MISERY. Say it savagely, biting the paltry and feeble words, and overaccenting the metronomic rhythm, the same flaccid-syllabled rhythm as that of King Caligula. Say it savagely, with eyes closed, lying rigid in the berth, the right foot crossed over the left, flexing and reflexing against the coarse sheet. Explore the first cabin in your pajamas, find the passenger list and the number of Cynthia’s cabin, and putting your absurd chin (in which the bones are slowly being rotted by pyorrhea) over the window sill, recite in the darkness … not this, not this, but something exquisite, something young. Awakening up he took her hollow lute, tumultous; and in chords that tenderest be He played an ancient ditty, long since mute, in Provence called “LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.” The boy stood on the burning deck. Eating peanuts by the peck … Cynthia! are you awake?… Yes! Who is it?… Saint William of Yonkers. Listen! I will tell you all about my childhood — everything. You will see how pathetic it was. You will see what long, lonely, lugubrious life I have led. The Irish girl, separated from me by one inch of painted wood, is trying to attract my attention, knocking with her sweet little elbow against the wall. Last night I replied, tentatively. Tonight, so great in your heavenly influence upon me, so permeated is my gross body by your beauty, that I pay no attention. Are you listening?… Yes, darling … I am a man full of pity and gentleness! My face is the face of one grown gently wise with suffering — ah, with what years of untold suffering! I have been misunderstood — I have blundered — I have sinned — Oh, I have sinned; but I have paid the price. My father was cruel. When I was five, he burnt off my left hand because I had been striking matches … I begged in the streets, having no money to buy the necessary books; for even as a little child I had a passion for knowledge and beauty. A Chinaman gave me a quarter, and I bought … what was it I bought? Nick Carter in Colorado. The Arabian Nights. Almost Fourteen. Fiske’s Cosmic Philosophy. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Espronceda’s El Diablo Mundo. The Icelandic Voluspa. An Essay on the Trallian School. A Variorum edition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, in eighteen volumes. A Variorum edition of Thank You Kindly Sir She Said, in two hundred volumes. Are you still listening, Cynthia?… Yes, beloved … I adore you, Cynthia. I have been a fool — I have lost you — but I adore you, and I will adore you forever. Your physical defects — do I not know them? A nostril just a suspicion too “painfle.” A voice exquisite, light, Shelleyan — but lacking in those deep-throated qualities, voluptuous and resonant, with which I love a woman, now and again, to turn challengingly upon me. Breasts a little too low and large; a gait a shade too self-conscious; a bearing rather too much in the tradition of the “expensive slouch.” But these are immaterial — forgive me for mentioning them. I adore them, I do not desire to touch them, nor to touch you. My feeling for you is wholly sublimated: I can trace in it no physical desire. I should fear and distrust any impulse to bring your tall body into contact with mine. I should like only to live with you in some strange, rarefied world — cold, clear, translunar and spacious; a world of which you know the secret, and I do not; a world of the subtle and the fragile, of the crepuscular and the vitreous, of suggestions dim but precise, of love inexpressive and thought unconcealed. An imparadised Amalfi, marble terraces of orange groves and camellias, rising out of the violet of the sea and ascending into the violet of the empyrean? No? Too much like marzipan? Let us, then, leave the world as it is; but make of it, by knowing all its secrets, our terrestrial heaven … Are you listening, Cynthia?… Listening,