Gr-r-r — there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your
damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed
men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood,
would not mine kill you!
What? your
myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose
has prior claims —
Needs its leaden
vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up
with its flames!
At the meal we sit
together;
Salve tibi! I
must hear
Wise talk of the
kind of weather,
Sort of season,
time of year:
Not a plenteous
cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope
oak-galls, I doubt;
What’s the Latin
name for “parsley?”
What’s the
Greek name for Swine’s Snout?
Whew! We’ll have
our platter burnished,
Laid with care
on our own shelf!
With a fire-new
spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet
for ourself,
Rinsed like
something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to
touch our chaps —
Marked with L. for
our initial!
(He-he! There
his lily snaps!)
Saint, forsooth!
While brown Dolores
Squats outside
the Convent bank
With Sanchicha,
telling stories,
Steeping
tresses in the tank,
Blue-black,
lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
— Can’t I see
his dead eye glow,
Bright as ’twere a
Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if
he’d let it show!)
When he finishes
refection,
Knife and fork
he never lays
Cross-wise, to my
recollection,
As do I, in
Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity
illustrate,
Drinking
watered orange-pulp —
In three sips the
Arian frustrate;
While he drains
his at one gulp.
Oh, those melons?
If he’s able
We’re to have a
feast! so nice!
One goes to the
Abbot’s table,
All of us get
each a slice.
How go on your
flowers? None double?
Not one
fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! — And I,
too, at such trouble,
Keep them
close-nipped on the sly!
There’s a great
text in Galatians,
Once you trip
on it, entails
Twenty-nine
distinct damnations,
One sure, if
another fails:
If I trip him just
a-dying,
Sure of heaven
as sure as can be,
Spin him round and
send him flying
Off to hell, a
Manichee?
Or, my scrofulous
French novel
On grey paper
with blunt type!
Simply glance at
it, you grovel
Hand and foot
in Belial’s gripe:
If I double down
its pages
At the woeful
sixteenth print,
When he gathers
his greengages,
Ope a sieve and
slip it in ’t?
Or, there’s Satan!
— one might venture
Pledge one’s
soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the
indenture
As he’d miss
till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that
rose-acacia
We’re so proud
of! Hy, Zy, Hine ...
“St, there’s
Vespers! Plena gratiâ
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r — you swine!
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