Human Cylinders in parts, Mina Loy

Human Cylinders

(my favorite parts of the mysterious poem anyway)

by Mina Loy

The human cylinders

Although born in England, Mina Loy worked as a poet and visual artist in Paris, Florence, and New York City, where her beauty and outlandish behavior shone at the center of several avant-garde circles. The eccentric vocabulary and syntax of Loy’s free-verse poems and their sardonic treatment of love can puzzle and offend, but no reader can question the work’s originality nor the poet’s fierce intelligence.
1882-1966–The Poetry Foundation

Revolving in the enervating dusk

That wraps each closer in the mystery

Of singularity

Among the litter of a sunless afternoon

Having eaten without tasting

Talked without communion

And at least two of us

Loved a very little

Without seeking

To know if our two miseries

In the lucid rush-together of automatons

Could form one opulent wellbeing ….

Simplifications of men

In the enervating dusk

Your indistinctness

Serves me the core of the kernel of you

When in the frenzied reaching out of intellect to intellect

Leaning brow to brow       communicative

Over the abyss of the potential

Concordance of respiration

Shames

Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory

And reciprocity

Of conception

And expression

Where each extrudes beyond the tangible

One thin pale trail of speculation

From among us we have sent out

Into the enervating dusk ……

….The impartiality of the absolute

Routs      the polemic

Or which of us

Would not

Receiving the holy-ghost

Catch it      and caging

Lose it

Or in the problematic

Destroy the Universe

With a solution…

Mina Loy, “Human Cylinders” from The Last Lunar Baedeker