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Basil Bunting: Attis III
Pastorale arioso
(falsetto)
What mournful stave, what bellow shakes the grove?
O, it is Attis grieving for his testicles!
Attis stiffening amid the snows
and the wind whining through his hair and fingers!
'Pines, my sisters, I, your sister,
chaffered for lambs in the marketplace.
I also won the 14 carat halfhunter goldwatch
at the annual sports and flowershow.
The young girls simpered when I passed.
Now I am out of a job. I would like to be lady's-maid
to Dindyma.
Pines, my sisters, I, your sister,
tended the bull and the entire horse.
Pensive geldings gape stale adolescence religiously,
yearning for procreative energy;
call it God. I sat amongst the atheists,
I was bankrupted by affiliation orders
who now bow my chaste vegetable forehead
to Dindyma.
Pines, my sisters, I, your sister,
parch in calm weather, swelter in Scirocco, sway in northwind,
I am passive to the heave of spring.
In the season I will pay my phallic harvest
to Dindyma.
Dindyma! Dindyma!
The wraith of my manhood,
the cruel ghost of my manhood,
limp in hell,
leapt sleeplessly in strange beds.
I have forgotten most of the details,
most of the names,
and the responses to
the ithyphallic hymns:
forgotten the syntax,
and the paradigms
grate scrappily against reluctant nerves.
(Oh Sis!
I've been 'ad!
I've been 'ad proper!)
Shall we be whole in Elysium?
I am rooted in you,
Dindyma!
assure me
the roses and myrtles,
the lavish roses,
the naively
portentous myrtles,
corroborate the peacock.
(I've been 'ad!)'
To whom Cybele:
'The peacock's knavery
keeps you in slavery.
The roses cheat
you, butcher's meat.
The myrtles' pretence
offends commonsense.
Yet a muse defrauds
the Mother of the Gods.
Ponder this allegorical
oracle.'
Attis his embleme:
Nonnulla deest.
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