Part 1
Exodus lay under an oak-tree
Bordering on Buda Pest he had lain
him down to over-night under the lofty rain
of starlight
having leapt from the womb
eighteen years ago and grown
neglected along the shores of the Danube
on the Danube in the Danube
-or breaking his legs behind runaway horses-
with a Carnival quirk
every Shrove Tuesday
Of his riches
a Patriarch
erected a synagogue
——for the people
His son
looked upon Lea
——of the people
she sat in Synagogue
—her hair long as the Talmud
—her tamarind eyes——
and disinherited
begat this Exodus
Imperial Austria taught the child
the German secret patriotism
the Magyar tongue the father
stuffed him with biblical Hebrew and the
seeds of science exhorting him
to vindicate
his forefather's ambitions
The child
flowered precociously fever
smote the father
the widowed mother
took to her bosom a spouse
of her own sphere
and hired
Exodus in apprenticeship
to such as garrulously inarticulate
ignore the cosmic cultures
Sinister foster-parents
who lashed the boy
to that paralysis of
the spiritual apparatus
common to
the poor
The arid gravid
intellect of jewish ancestors
the senile juvenile
calculating prodigies of Jehovah
—Crushed by the Occident ox
they scraped
the gold gold golden
muck from off its hoofs
moves Exodus to emmigrate
coveting the alien
asylum of voluntary military
service paradise of the pound-stirling
where the domestic Jew in lieu
of knouts is lashed with tongues
The cannibal God
shutters his lids of night on the day's gluttony
the partially devoured humanity
warms its unblessed beds with bare prostrations
An insect from an herb
errs on the man-mountain
imparts its infinitesimal tactile stimulus
to the epiderm to the spirit
of Exodus
stirring the anaesthetised load
of racial instinct frustrated
impulse infantile impacts with unreason
on his unconscious
Blinking his eyes———
at sunrise Exodus
lumbar-aching sleep logged turns his ear
to the grit earth and hears
the boom of cardiac cataracts
thumping the turf
with his young pulse
He is undone! How should he know
he has a heart The Danube
gives no instruction in anatomy—
the primary
throb of the animate
a beating mystery
pounds on his ignorance
in seeming
death dealing—
The frightened fatalist
clenches his eyes
for the involuntary sacrifice
stark
to the sun-zumm dirges of
a bee
he lays him out
for his heart-beats to slay him
It is not accomplished
the burning track
of lengthening sun shafts
spur
This lying-in-state of a virility
to rise
and in his surprised
protracted viability
shoulder his pack
Exodus whose initiations
in arrogance through brief
stimulation of his intellect
in servitude through early
ill-usage etch involute
inhibitions
upon his sensibility
sharpened and blunted he
—bound for his unformulate
conception of life—
makes for the harbour
and the dogged officer of Destiny
kept Exodus
and that which he begat
moving along
The highest paid tailor's
cutter in the ‘City’
Exodus. Lord Israel
nicknamed from his consummate bearing
his coaly eye
challenging the unrevealed universe
speaking fluently ‘business-English’
to the sartorial world
jibbering stock exchange quotations
and conundrums of finance
to which unlettered immigrants are instantly
initiate
Those foreigners
before whom the soul
of the new Motherland
stands nakedly incognito
in so many ciphers
In the boarding-house the lady with
the locket ‘You will excuse me——
Our Dear Queen picks chicken bones in
her fingers” Exodus at leisure
painting knowing not why
sunflowers turned sunwards
Sundays when
England closed the eyes of every
commercial enterprise
but the church and spewed
her silent servants out of her areas
in their bi-weekly ‘best’ to
“Ow get along with you” their lurching lovers
along the rails of parks
The high-striped soldiers of the swagger-stick
tempting the wilder flowers of womanhood
to lick-be-quick ice cream
outside the barracks
This jovian hebrew ‘all dressed up
and nowhere to go’
stands like a larch
upon the corners of incarcerate streets
deploring the anomolous legs
of Zion's sons
with the subconscious
irritant of superiority
left in an aristocacy out of currency
paces
the cancellated desert of the metropolis
with the instinctive urge of loneliness
to get to ‘the heart of something’
The heart of England
sporting its oak
on the rude ratepayer
Hymns ancient and modern
bela bour crippled cottage-grands
in parlour fronts
A thrush
shatters its song upon the spurious shade
of a barred bird-fancier's
The dumb philosophies
of the wondering jew
fall into rhythm with
long unlistened-to hebrew chants
A wave
‘out of tide’ with the surrounding
ocean he breaks
insensitized non-participance upon himself
(The) unperceived
conqueror of a new world
in terms of cutting and drafting
Exodus lifts his head
over the alien crowds
under the alien clouds
proudly as memory
evokes the panic-stricken
discoverer of his own heart coming
barefoot to the Synagogue
erected by his grandfather———
The Rabbi said “Your grandfather
was a great and a just man
we reap what he has sown
—honoured be his memory so here's
your fare third class
May the God of Israel
bless thee among the Gentiles”
And the God of the Gentiles
blessed him among Israel
he had several
shares in the South Eastern
Railway and other
securities Suddenly
he remembers how his mother
told him he was a seven month's child
—thing of etherial circulation—
wrapped in wadding somewhat
green-seeming as an untimely apple
And Exodus feels cold
with sympathy for that cold thing
that was himself———
The london dusk
wraps up the aborted entity
heeding Solomon's admonishing spends
circumcised circumspect
his evenings doing lightening calculations
for his high pleasure Painting———
feeling his pulse———
Incorporeal express trains
from opposite directions
of unequal lengths and velocities
flash through his abstract eye
determines instantly the time
to a decimal fraction of a second
they take to pass each other
Under his ivory hands
his sunflowers sunwards
glow confuse with itinerant
Judaic eyes peering
through narrow-slim entrance-arches
The terrestrial trees shades
virgin bosoms and blossoms
in course of his acclimatization
a hedge-rose———
He paints
He feels his pulse
The spiritual tentacles of vanity
that each puts out towards the culture
of his epoch knowing not how to find
and finding not contact he has repealed
to fumble among his guts
The only
personal reality
he brought from Hungary he takes
to Harley street where medicine
sits the only social science applied to the outsider
The parasite attaches to the English Rose
———at a guinea a visit
becomes more tangible to himself the exile
mechanism he learns is built
to the same osseous structure shares
identical phenomena with those
populating the Island
that segregated
from his apprehension moves
a universe of unceasing
energies for the biological
explorer's introspection
His body
becomes the target of his speculation
His brain ranvenous for informative food
spins cobwebs on the only available
branching out of facts
clings to the visceral
items he has heard mentioned
until they ache
under mesmeric concentration
Exodus discovers his nerves
as once Mankind
in pathological mysticism believed
itself to have discovered
its soul
David's daughter's doweries
and olive-eyes
virgins capitalized
to tantalize!
Jehovah's tailor
sets up in business for himself
however
Some queer
marital independence on the English air
keeping him bachelor
While through
stock quotations
and Latin prescriptions
for physic
filters the lyric
aroma of the rose
Exodus knows
no longer father
or brother
or the God of the Jews,
it is his to choose
finance or
romance of the rose.
Bordering on Buda Pest he had lain
him down to over-night under the lofty rain
of starlight
having leapt from the womb
eighteen years ago and grown
neglected along the shores of the Danube
on the Danube in the Danube
-or breaking his legs behind runaway horses-
with a Carnival quirk
every Shrove Tuesday
Of his riches
a Patriarch
erected a synagogue
——for the people
His son
looked upon Lea
——of the people
she sat in Synagogue
—her hair long as the Talmud
—her tamarind eyes——
and disinherited
begat this Exodus
Imperial Austria taught the child
the German secret patriotism
the Magyar tongue the father
stuffed him with biblical Hebrew and the
seeds of science exhorting him
to vindicate
his forefather's ambitions
The child
flowered precociously fever
smote the father
the widowed mother
took to her bosom a spouse
of her own sphere
and hired
Exodus in apprenticeship
to such as garrulously inarticulate
ignore the cosmic cultures
Sinister foster-parents
who lashed the boy
to that paralysis of
the spiritual apparatus
common to
the poor
The arid gravid
intellect of jewish ancestors
the senile juvenile
calculating prodigies of Jehovah
—Crushed by the Occident ox
they scraped
the gold gold golden
muck from off its hoofs
moves Exodus to emmigrate
coveting the alien
asylum of voluntary military
service paradise of the pound-stirling
where the domestic Jew in lieu
of knouts is lashed with tongues
The cannibal God
shutters his lids of night on the day's gluttony
the partially devoured humanity
warms its unblessed beds with bare prostrations
An insect from an herb
errs on the man-mountain
imparts its infinitesimal tactile stimulus
to the epiderm to the spirit
of Exodus
stirring the anaesthetised load
of racial instinct frustrated
impulse infantile impacts with unreason
on his unconscious
Blinking his eyes———
at sunrise Exodus
lumbar-aching sleep logged turns his ear
to the grit earth and hears
the boom of cardiac cataracts
thumping the turf
with his young pulse
He is undone! How should he know
he has a heart The Danube
gives no instruction in anatomy—
the primary
throb of the animate
a beating mystery
pounds on his ignorance
in seeming
death dealing—
The frightened fatalist
clenches his eyes
for the involuntary sacrifice
stark
to the sun-zumm dirges of
a bee
he lays him out
for his heart-beats to slay him
It is not accomplished
the burning track
of lengthening sun shafts
spur
This lying-in-state of a virility
to rise
and in his surprised
protracted viability
shoulder his pack
Exodus whose initiations
in arrogance through brief
stimulation of his intellect
in servitude through early
ill-usage etch involute
inhibitions
upon his sensibility
sharpened and blunted he
—bound for his unformulate
conception of life—
makes for the harbour
and the dogged officer of Destiny
kept Exodus
and that which he begat
moving along
The highest paid tailor's
cutter in the ‘City’
Exodus. Lord Israel
nicknamed from his consummate bearing
his coaly eye
challenging the unrevealed universe
speaking fluently ‘business-English’
to the sartorial world
jibbering stock exchange quotations
and conundrums of finance
to which unlettered immigrants are instantly
initiate
Those foreigners
before whom the soul
of the new Motherland
stands nakedly incognito
in so many ciphers
In the boarding-house the lady with
the locket ‘You will excuse me——
Our Dear Queen picks chicken bones in
her fingers” Exodus at leisure
painting knowing not why
sunflowers turned sunwards
Sundays when
England closed the eyes of every
commercial enterprise
but the church and spewed
her silent servants out of her areas
in their bi-weekly ‘best’ to
“Ow get along with you” their lurching lovers
along the rails of parks
The high-striped soldiers of the swagger-stick
tempting the wilder flowers of womanhood
to lick-be-quick ice cream
outside the barracks
This jovian hebrew ‘all dressed up
and nowhere to go’
stands like a larch
upon the corners of incarcerate streets
deploring the anomolous legs
of Zion's sons
with the subconscious
irritant of superiority
left in an aristocacy out of currency
paces
the cancellated desert of the metropolis
with the instinctive urge of loneliness
to get to ‘the heart of something’
The heart of England
sporting its oak
on the rude ratepayer
Hymns ancient and modern
bela bour crippled cottage-grands
in parlour fronts
A thrush
shatters its song upon the spurious shade
of a barred bird-fancier's
The dumb philosophies
of the wondering jew
fall into rhythm with
long unlistened-to hebrew chants
A wave
‘out of tide’ with the surrounding
ocean he breaks
insensitized non-participance upon himself
(The) unperceived
conqueror of a new world
in terms of cutting and drafting
Exodus lifts his head
over the alien crowds
under the alien clouds
proudly as memory
evokes the panic-stricken
discoverer of his own heart coming
barefoot to the Synagogue
erected by his grandfather———
The Rabbi said “Your grandfather
was a great and a just man
we reap what he has sown
—honoured be his memory so here's
your fare third class
May the God of Israel
bless thee among the Gentiles”
And the God of the Gentiles
blessed him among Israel
he had several
shares in the South Eastern
Railway and other
securities Suddenly
he remembers how his mother
told him he was a seven month's child
—thing of etherial circulation—
wrapped in wadding somewhat
green-seeming as an untimely apple
And Exodus feels cold
with sympathy for that cold thing
that was himself———
The london dusk
wraps up the aborted entity
heeding Solomon's admonishing spends
circumcised circumspect
his evenings doing lightening calculations
for his high pleasure Painting———
feeling his pulse———
Incorporeal express trains
from opposite directions
of unequal lengths and velocities
flash through his abstract eye
determines instantly the time
to a decimal fraction of a second
they take to pass each other
Under his ivory hands
his sunflowers sunwards
glow confuse with itinerant
Judaic eyes peering
through narrow-slim entrance-arches
The terrestrial trees shades
virgin bosoms and blossoms
in course of his acclimatization
a hedge-rose———
He paints
He feels his pulse
The spiritual tentacles of vanity
that each puts out towards the culture
of his epoch knowing not how to find
and finding not contact he has repealed
to fumble among his guts
The only
personal reality
he brought from Hungary he takes
to Harley street where medicine
sits the only social science applied to the outsider
The parasite attaches to the English Rose
———at a guinea a visit
becomes more tangible to himself the exile
mechanism he learns is built
to the same osseous structure shares
identical phenomena with those
populating the Island
that segregated
from his apprehension moves
a universe of unceasing
energies for the biological
explorer's introspection
His body
becomes the target of his speculation
His brain ranvenous for informative food
spins cobwebs on the only available
branching out of facts
clings to the visceral
items he has heard mentioned
until they ache
under mesmeric concentration
Exodus discovers his nerves
as once Mankind
in pathological mysticism believed
itself to have discovered
its soul
David's daughter's doweries
and olive-eyes
virgins capitalized
to tantalize!
Jehovah's tailor
sets up in business for himself
however
Some queer
marital independence on the English air
keeping him bachelor
While through
stock quotations
and Latin prescriptions
for physic
filters the lyric
aroma of the rose
Exodus knows
no longer father
or brother
or the God of the Jews,
it is his to choose
finance or
romance of the rose.
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