U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [182]
-9-and go shock the Booch and drink wine for supper at the Lenox before catching the Federal
I'm so tired of violets
Take them all away
when the telegram came that she was dying the bel -glass cracked in a screech of slate pencils (have you ever never been able to sleep for a week in April?) and He met me in the grey trainshed my eyes were stinging with vermil ion bronze and chromegreen inks that oozed from the spinning April hil s His moustaches were white the tired droop of an old man's cheeks She's gone Jack
grief isnt a uniform and the in the parlor the waxen odor of lilies in the parlor (He and I we must bury the uniform of grief)
then the riversmel the shimmering Potomac reaches
the little choppysilver waves at Indian Head there
were mockingbirds in the graveyard and the roadsides steamed with spring April enough to shock the world when the cable came that He was dead I walked
through the streets ful of fiveoclock Madrid seething with twilight in shivered cubes of aguardiente redwine gaslamp-green sunsetpink tileochre eyes lips red cheeks brown pil ar of the throat climbed on the night train at the Norte station without knowing why I'm so tired of violets
Take them all away
-10-the shattered iridescent bel glass the careful y copied busts the architectural details the grammar of styles it was the end of that book and I left the Oxford poets in the little noisy room that smelt of stale oliveoil in the Pension Boston Ahora. Now Maintenant Vita
Nuova but we
who had heard Copey's beautiful reading voice and
read the handsomely bound books and breathed deep
(breathe deep one two three four) of the waxwork
lilies and the artificial parmaviolet scent under the ether-cone and sat breakfasting in the library where the bust was of Octavius
were now dead at the cableoffice
on the rumblebumping wooden bench on the train
slamming through midnight climbing up from the steer-age to get a whiff of Atlantic on the lunging steamship (the ovalfaced Swiss girl and her husband were my
friends) she had slightly popeyes and a little gruff way of saying Zut alors and throwing us a little smile a fish to a sealion that warmed our darkness when the immigra-tion officer came for her passport he couldn't send her to El is Island la grippe espagnole she was dead washing those windows
K.P.
cleaning the sparkplugs with a pocketknife
-11-A. W. O. L.
grinding the American Beauty roses to dust in that
whore's bed (the foggy night flamed with proclamations of the League: of the Rights of Man) the almond smel of high explosives sending singing éclats through the sweetish puking grandiloquence of the rotting dead
tomorrow I hoped would be the first day of the first month of the first year PLAYBOY
Jack Reed
was the son of a United States Marshal, a promi-nent citizen of Portland Oregon. He was a likely boy
so his folks sent him east to school
and to Harvard.
Harvard stood for the broad a and those contacts
so useful in later life and good English prose . . . if the hedgehog cant be cultured at Harvard the hedge-hog cant at al and the Lowel s only speak to the Cabots and the Cabots
and the Oxford Book of Verse.
Reed was a likely youngster, he wasnt a jew or a
socialist and he didnt come from Roxbury; he was
husky greedy had appetite for everything: a man's got to like many things in his life. Reed was a man; he liked men he liked women
he liked eating and writing and foggy nights and drink-ing and foggy nights and swimming and footbal and
-12-rhymed verse and being cheerleader ivy orator making clubs (not the very best clubs, his blood didn't run thin enough for the very best clubs)
and Copey voice reading The Man Who Would
Be King, the dying fal Urnburial, good English prose the lamps coming on across the Yard, under the elms in the twilight
dim voices in lecturehal s,
the dying fal the elms the Discobulus the bricks of the old buildings and the commemorative gates and the goodies and the deans and the instructors al crying in thin voices refrain,
refrain; the rusty machinery creaked, the deans
quivered under