The Love Song of  J. Alfred New York

                                   

[An adaptation of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as T. S. Eliot would surely have revised it late of a Tuesday morning] 

 

Epigraph: These lines are taken from Dante’s “Inferno”, and are spoken by the character of Count Guido da Montefelltro. Dante meets the punished Guido in the Eighth chasm of Hell. Guido explains that he is speaking freely to Dante only because he believes Dante is one of the dead who could never return to earth to report what he says. Translated from the original Italian, the lines are as follows:

 

If I thought that my reply would be

   To one who ever to earth should return,

This flame would remain of cold degree,

   Forebearing of candor to further burn; 

But, since no one has ever returned alive

   From this gulf (if what I hear is true)

I can, with no fear of infamy,

   In all hellfire, confidence  answer you.

                                                      —dante’s “inferno”

 

 

Let us go then, you and I,

Now that Terror is spread out against the sky

Like Patience etherised upon a table;

Let us go through certain holocausted streets,

Unuttering retreats

Of wrested lives in one-flight death cartels

[Now sawdust the restaurants, the cloistered cells]:

Streets now hollow [like the tedious argument

Of infidels’ intent]

That lead you to one overwhelming question…

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

 

In the gloom the living come and go

Babbling of Osama so.

 

   The hellish dust that rubs its back upon the window panes,

The hellish smoke that rubs it muzzle on the wounded’s pains

Licked its tongue into the mourners of the morning,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the ash that falls from dying,

Slipped by the terror [having made the sudden leap]

And seeing that it was a lost September morn

Curled once about the charhouse, and fell asleep.

 

   And indeed there will be time

For the hellish smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the widows’ pains;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the spaces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the worsening ways of man

That lift and drop [that question] on our plate:

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for hunkered indecisions,

And for hungered visions and revisions

Before the taking of riposte and tea.

 

  In the gloom the living come and go

Muttering alike: “—Bin Laden! So….”

 

   And indeed there will be time

To wonder: “Do we dare?—” then “Do we dare?—”

[Time to turn black, undescent, at the stair:

Bald spot in Manhattan now all that is there]

—Did they cry: “How the air is growing thin!”

My mourning coat I clutch now to my chin,

My necktie modest [were it rich, a sin]

God!—they fell—as if Hell-dropped!—each pin

[Did they cry: “How our hopes and dreams are thin!”?]

How dare Death

Disturb our universe?

—In a moment!

When Time makes decisions and revisions

Which no prayers will reverse.

 

   For we have known them all already, known them all:—

Have known the zealots, madmen, fanatic loons

Who measure out their lives with Khadafi spoons;

We know their choices: dying with a dying fall

[Beneath the mystics from a farther room].

   So how should we presume?

 

   And we have known their lies already, known them all—

The lies that fix you with a formulated phrase,

And when we are formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When we are pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should we begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of our dazened ways?

   And how should we presume?

 

   And we have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are sinister and dark (none spare!)

[But in Death’s limelight, downed with fright, despair!]

Is it odor rank, of death,

That makes me catch my breath?

Arms that fly along, unstable, and wrap about us all.

   And should life then resume?

   And how should we begin?

 

.  .  .  .  . 

 

Shall we say, We have gone at dusk through marrowed streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pyres

Of not only men in shirt-sleeves careening out of windows?

 

   We should have been but pairs of mangled claws

Crushed amongst the floors of mute debris.

 

.  .  .  .  .

 

And the afternoon, the evening weeps unceasingly!

Unsoothed of its long fingers,

Sleep? … tired … it but malingers,

Wretched, upon the corps, here beside you and me.

Should we, after pleas [what ache suffices?]

Have the strength to force this moment to its crisis?

But though we have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though we have seen Freedom’s head (grown frightly, bald!)

Brought in upon a platter,

We are not prophets—yet see this one great matter:

We have seen the greatness of our freedom flicker,

And seen the eternal footman hold our coat, and snicker,

And in short, we are afraid.

 

And would it have been worth it, after all?

After the breakups, the fire brigades, the debris,

Among crushed policemen, among some shock of you and me,

Would it have been worthwhile

To have bitten off lives shattered with a smile,

To roll them toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all—I shall kill you all—”

If Freedom, settling such killings by her head,

   Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

   That is not it at all”?

 

   And would it have been worth it, after all?

Would it have been worthwhile,

After the done flesh and the floor-shards, and the flesh-crinkled streets,

After the grovellings, after the pleas crushed,

After the skirts impaled between each floor

—All this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a tragic lantern

Threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worthwhile

If Life, throwing off the horror as if it were a shawl,

And  turning toward Death’s windrow should say:

   “That it not it all.

   That is not what I meant at all”?

 

No! Art thou not, principal hamlet [as foremeant to be],

An ascendant lord—one that will do

To swell our progress, stage a scene or two?

—Uprise, O Prince! No doubt, no sleazy tool

Irreverential shall make sad thy use

—Advise the prints!: No impolitics, caustic and conspicuous,

Full of high sentence, and bitter juice,

Shall make thee, in deed, ridiculous,

Make thee, these times, their fool.

 

 

   We’ll grow old, New York . . . we’ll grow bold! . . .

We’ll not wear Fear’s cold trousers  uprolled

—Nor yet Death’s bell-bottoms, loud tolled!

 

   Would we part all fair behind? Let us dare to eat a peach—

Let us wear bright Freedom’s trousers, and walk upon the beach!

O hear! the mermaids singing each to each.

 

   I think, love, they do sing to thee.

 

   O see them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

As she fair blows them white, not black.

 

   Though we linger yet in chambers of the sea

In caverns wreathed with seaweed, dread and brown,

While our human voices wake us,

Yet does Freedom not forsake us

—Let such tempests ever shake us,

We shan’t drown.