Two Lyrics From Kilroy's Carnival: A Masque

Delmore Schwartz

I Aria

“—Kiss me there where pride is glittering
Kiss me where I am ripened and round fruit
Kiss me wherever, however, I am supple, bare and flare
(Let the bell be rung as long as I am young:
                let ring and fly like a great bronze wing!)

“—I’ll kiss you wherever you think you are poor,
Wherever you shudder, feeling striped or barred,
Because you think you are bloodless, skinny or marred:
                Until, until
                your gaze has been stilled—
Until you are shamed again no more!
I’ll kiss you until your body and soul
                the mind in the body being fulfilled—
Suspend their dread and civil war!”

II Song

Under the yellow sea
Who comes and looks with me
For the daughters of music, the fountains of poetry?
Both have soared forth from the unending waters
Where all things still are seeds and far from flowers
And since they remain chained to the sea’s powers
May wilt to nonentity or loll and arise to comedy
Or thrown into mere accident through irrelevant incident
Dissipate all identity ceaselessly fragmented by the ocean’s
                immense and intense, irresistible and insistent
                    action,
Be scattered like the sand is, purposely and relentlessly,
Living in the summer resorts of the dead endlessly.

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