The Effectual Marriage by Mina Loy — Read

Or, The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni / The door was an absurd thing / Yet it was passable / They quotidienly passed through it / It was this shape / Gina and Miovanni / who they were God knows / They knew / it was important to them / This being of who they were / They were themselves / Corporeally / transcendentally / consecutively / conjunctively / and they were quite / complete / In the evening they looked out of their two windows / Miovanni out of his library window / Gina from the kitchen window / From among his pots and pans / Where he so kindly kept her / Where she so wisely busied herself / Pots and Pans / she cooked in them / All sorts of sialagogues / Some say / that happy women are immaterial / So here we might dispense with her / Gina being a female / But she was more than that / Being an incipience / a correlative / an instigation of the reaction of man / From the palpable to the transcendent / Mollescent irritant of his fantasy / Gina had her use / Being useful / contentedly conscious / She flowered in Empyrean / From which no well-mated woman ever returns / Sundays / a warm light in the parlor / From the gritty road / on the white wall / anybody could see it / Shimmered a composite effigy / Madonna / crinolined / a man / hidden beneath her hoop / Ho for the blue and red of her / The silent eyelids of her / The shiny smile of her / Ding dong / said the bell / Miovanni / Gina called / Would it be fitting for you to tell / the time for supper / Pooh / said Miovanni / I am / Outside time and space / Patience said Gina / is an attribute / And she learned / at any hour to offer / The dish / appropriately delectable / What had Miovanni made of his ego / In his library / What had Gina wondered / among the pots and pans / One never asked the other / So they / the wise ones / eat their suppers in peace / Of what their peace consisted / We cannot say / Only that he was magnificently man / She insignificantly a woman who understood / Understanding / what is that / To Each / his entity / to others / their idiosyncrasies / to the free expansion / to the annexed / their liberty / To man his work / To woman her love / Succulent meals / and an occasional caress / So be it / It so seldom is / While Miovanni thought alone in the dark / Gina supposed that peeping / she might see / A round light / shining / where his mind was / She never opened the door / Fearing that this might blind her / Or even / That she should see / Nothing at all / So while he thought / She hung out of the window / Watching for falling stars / And when a star fell / She wished / that still / Miovanni would love her to-morrow / And as Miovanni / Never gave any heed to the matter / He did / Gina was a woman / Who wanted everything / To be everything in woman / Everything everyway at once / Diurnally variegate / Miovanni always knew her / She was Gina / Gina who lent monogamy / With her fluctuant aspirations / A changeant consistency / Unexpected intangibilities / Miovanni remained / Monumentally the same / The same Miovanni / If he had become anything else / Gina's world would have been at an end / Gina with no axis to revolve on / Must have dwindled to a full stop / In the mornings she dropped / Cool crystals / Through devotional fingers / Saccharine / for his cup / And marketed / With a Basket / Trimmed with a red flannel flower / When she was lazy / She wrote a poem on the milk bill / The first strophe / Good morning / The second / Good night / Something not too difficult to / Learn by heart / The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table / Greasy cleanliness / of the chopper board / The coloured vegetables / Intuited quality of flour / Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal / Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses / Pet simplicities of her Universe / Where circles were only round / Having no vices.

(This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the home of a mad woman.