Classic Poem

(As John Peale Bishop thinks it might be done by Ezra Pound in his later and more disconnected manner)

Damn it all, I have not forgot America —
Ricordate di me; sono lo pio —
There was a song I heard in a smoker,
Not found in a bookstall — the book with broken hinges —
Not Arnaut now, nor Cavalcanti.

At Neuvic, in the blue Dordogne,
A grotto, grey-green, the lighting by Da Vinci,
Whither the old countess was moved from her bedchamber
To ripple the silvery pool, bathing her ankle,
Lancan son passat li giure —
Mine's the trick of a false beginning!

A lupinaria slit with two posterns
In some nether quarter, Chicago or the Lehigh Valley —
There's my setting, now for the phantastikon.
Stalking with delicate tread amid the sparrows,
Venus's sparrows, a house-drab, stabbed with jealousy,
Seeks with a gun and a Winelout's connivance
After her lover. " He was my man,
But he done me wrong " — so the stave hath't.
Lugete, Veneres!

Charles Baudelaire, hair green like a drowned man's,
Sang in sonnet, loved in his life rather,
A negress, bizarre, sorciere au flanc d'ebene :
So this Johnnie — who it seems was rich in kisses,
Basiationnes (I improvise on the cadence)
Which through the solid sunlight, lustful, with golden
Greaves and breastplates drew, or might have drawn
To his fall an archangel.
I crack my wit and close the canzone.