Explore "Boarding-House Episode" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Apples race into appetites: / The unswerving mechanism of the table / Hurries through the last dish of supper. / Then an undulating interlude / From people who have spent one pleasure, / Distractedly juggling its aftermath / And peering at new desires. / One woman gazes at another / While twitching murder shimmers in her eyes / And skims across her face. / Violets in a madman's scene, / Suspended in the air, / Are the eyes of her neighbour. / And in between them sits the nervous man / With face like pouting gargoyle, / Whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot say: / Explosive evasions; / Fears too tired to shriek; / Renunciations groaning from their dungeons. / He eyes each woman, like a man / Solemnly trying to walk on mysterious ice. / Crisp inanities ripple back and forth / Among these three, like ghostly parrots / Visiting each other's cages.
/ She with crazy, violet eyes, / Plays with her fork, as though its clink / Rhymed with secret, chained thoughts; / She with murder in her eyes, / And curtly voluminous body, / Evenly plays her child-rôle. / Cringing on the rim of middle age, / With broken shields piled at her feet, / She has made this man a haunted palace / And she stands before the door / She dare not open, with a dagger / For the woman standing at her side.