Human Cylinders
Human Cylinders
Original Text
Mina Loy. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996): 40-1. PS 3523.O975 A6 1996X Robarts Library
1The human cylinders
2Revolving in the enervating dusk
3That wraps each closer in the mystery
4Of singularity
5Among the litter of a sunless afternoon
6Having eaten without tasting
7Talked without communion
8And at least two of us
9Loved a very little
10Without seeking
11To know if our two miseries
12In the lucid rush-together of automatons
13Could form one opulent wellbeing
14Simplifications of men
15In the enervating dusk
16Your indistinctness
17Serves me the core of the kernel of you
18When in the frenzied reaching out of intellect to intellect
19Leaning brow to brow communicative
20Over the abyss of the potential
21Concordance of respiration
22Shames
23Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory
24And reciprocity
25Of conception
26And expression
27Where each extrudes beyond the tangible
28One thin pale trail of speculation
29From among us we have sent out
30Into the enervating dusk
31One little whining beast
32Whose longing
33Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow
34And one elastic tentacle of intuition
35To quiver among the stars
36The impartiality of the absolute
37Routs the polemic
38Or which of us
39Would not
40Receiving the holy-ghost
41Catch it and caging
42Lose it
43Or in the problematic
44Destroy the Universe
45With a solution
Publication Start Year
1982
Publication Notes
The Last Lunar Baedeker: The Poems of Mina Loy, 1982.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire, assisted by Ana Berdinskikh
RPO Edition
2009
Form