Songs to Joannes XIII / Mina Loy

from Songs to Joannes

XIII

Come to me   There is something
I have got to tell you   and I can't tell
Something taking shape
Something has a new name
A new dimension
A new use
A new illusion

It is ambient              And it is in your eyes
Something shiny       Something only for you
                                      Something that I must not see

It is in my ears           Something very resonant
Something that you must not hear
                                      Something only for me

Let us be very jealous
Very suspicious
Very conservative
Very cruel
Or we might not make an end of the jostling aspirations
Disorb inviolate egos

Where two or three are welded together
They shall become god
— — — — — — —
Oh that's right
Keep away from me   Please give me a push
Don't let me understand you   Don't realize me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific Nirvana
Me you — you — me

~~ 

Mina Loy (1882-1966)

from Others, April 1917

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Mina Loy biography  

Lunar Baedeker / Mina Loy

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

             Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews ...
in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

~~

Mina Loy (1882-1966)

from Lunar Baedecker, 1923

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Mina Loy biography