Shadowy—under my window— Your low reed sobs Its desert love-song to the remembering stars. Shadowy— All the night my breasts are lilies, My lips are passion flowers.
Now, there you are—a nice idea, neatly handled and mysterious. Your guess as to what Poetess Janson is driving at is as good as mine—and both probably are wrong. Perhaps she was talking to Fred Beauvais under her window, or Jim Stillman. Or it may have been the alley cat—a thing sobbing in the backyard to the remembering stars.
And so the mystery thickens like onion jelly.
We let Gus read both these poems—the “Ode to a Jackass” and “Shadowy—Under My Window”—and Gus called the Shadowy stuff too highbrow. But Gus doesn’t know “highbrow” poetry when he reads it. Neither one is regular, lollypop highbrow literature. We have before us a recent copy of “Current Opinion” containing the following howl from the highbrow poet, Carl Sandburg:
My shirt is a token and a symbol More than a lover for sun and rain, My shirt is a signal And a teller of souls.
I can take off my shirt and tear it And so make a ripping, razzly noise, And the people will say, “Look at him tear his shirt.”
I can keep my shirt on; I can sit around and sing like a little bird, And look ’em all in the eye and never be fazed. I can keep my shirt on.
If we hadn’t happened across this copy of Current Opinion enroute home from the Atlantic City tea party we would have been just as ignorant as Gus as to what constitutes real highbrow poetry. We have known dames who could translate the languages of their Mexican hairless puppies. We have seen dumb-bells trying to get a prescription from an ouija board. Most poets—even the cuckoo who wrote the “Ode to a Jackass”—are familiar with the “voices of nature.” But unless we have been eating a wagon load of evaporated apples smothered in bootleg without any flavor—especially without vanilla flavor—Sandburg is shadow-boxing with nut sundaes when he is not writing poetry.
But that is highbrow, Gus, granting the shirt was clean, which we very much doubt.
When Gus was back East with me where they use the sign language—sign here and sign there—we took in a New York production and one of the comic lyrics handed over the footlights went something like this: