2. Tower

1910
Castellamare
I dined upon an orange in the shade of an orange tree

When, all at once…
It wasn’t the eruption of Vesuvius
It wasn’t the cloud of grasshoppers, one of Egypt’s ten plagues

Nor Pompeii
It wasn’t the resuscitated cries of giant mastodons

It wasn’t the Trumpet foretold
Nor Pierre Brisset’s frog
When, all at once,

Fires
Jolts
Fresh leaps
Spark of simultaneous horizons

My sex

O Eiffel Tower!
I haven’t fitted you with shoes of gold
I haven’t set you dancing on pavements of crystal
I haven’t vowed you to the Python like a virgin of Carthage
I haven’t wrapped you in the Greek peplos

I haven’t even made you divagate within the ring of menhirs
I haven’t named you David’s Rod nor Cross Wood
Lignum Crucis

O Eiffel Tower

Mammoth firework of the Universal Exposition!
On the Ganges
At Benares
Amidst the onanistic spinning-tops of Hindu temples

And the colorful cries of Oriental multitudes
You incline, gracious Palm!
It was you in the legendary epoch of the Hebraic people

Confounded the tongue of man
O Babel!
And some thousand years later, it was you again fell in tongues of

fire on the Apostles assembled in your church
On the open sea you’re a mast
And at the North Pole

You gleam with all the magnificence of the aurora borealis of

your wireless telegraph
Lianas tangle up with eucalyptus
And you float, old tree trunk, on the Mississippi

When
Your mouth opens

And a cayman seizes a Negro’s thigh
In Europe you’re like a scaffold
(I’d like to be the tower, hang on the Eiffel Tower!)

And when the sun is setting behind you
Bonnot’s head rolls neath the guillotine
In the heart of Africa it’s you running
Giraffe

Ostrich

Boa

Equator
Monsoons
In Australia you’ve ever been taboo
You’re the gaff that Captain Cool employed to steer his boat of
adventurers
O celestial sounding-line!

For the Simultaneous Delaunay, to whom I dedicate this poem,
You’re the brush he steeps in light

Gong tam-tam Zanzibar beast of the jungle X-rays express

scalpel symphony

You’re all

Tower
Ancient God
Modern beast

Solar spectrum
Subject of my poem
Tower
Tower of the world
Tower in motion

August 1913.