Poems by Maxwell Bodenheim

Straight strength pitched into the surliness of the ditch:
A soul you have--strength has always...

Your head is steel cut into drooping lines
That make a mask satirically meek:
Your face is lik...

Master of earnest equilibrium,
You are a Christ made delicate
By centuries of baffled meditati...

I despise my friends more than you.
I would have known myself but they stood before the mirrors
...

The ruins of your face were twined with youth.
Vines of starlight questioned your face when you ...

They are writing poems to you:
White devils who have not
Smeared the distant yellow of your li...

I walked upon a hill
And the wind, made solemnly drunk with your presence,
Reeled against me....

Shaking nights, noons tame and dust-quiet, and wind-broken days
Were hands modelling your face...

The tread-mill roar that ever tramps between
The smirched geometries of this stern place,
Swee...

The rails you carry cut into your hands,
Like the sharp lips of an unsought lover.
As you stum...

Negro,
Chinaman,
White servant-girl,
Russian woman,
Are learning how to be dead,
Aided ...

Twilight pushes down your eyes
With shimmering, pregnant fingers
That leave you covered with s...

I Because her voice is Schö nberg in a dream
In which his harshness plays with softer keys...

Two walls, dizzy with rain-touch
And suffused with gauzily amorous sunlight,
Creep over a hil...

This street is callous apathy
In a scale of greys and browns.
Its black roof-line suggests
Fla...