The Lost Lunar Baedeker by Mina Loy Page B

controversies over what is permissible in art evaporate, we will always find that the seeming strangeness has disappeared with them in the larger aspect of the work which has the eternal quality that is common to all true art.
    Out of the past most poets, after all, call to us with one or two perfect poems. And we have not complained of being too poor. You will find that the moderns have already done as much.
    H. D., who is an interesting example of my claims for the American poet who engages with an older culture, has written at least two perfect poems: one about a swan.
    Marianne Moore, whose writing so often amusingly suggests the soliloquies of a library clock, has written at least one perfect poem, “The Fish.”
    Lawrence Vail has written one perfect poem, the second “Cannibalistic Love Song,” a snatch of primitive ideation with a rhythm as essential as daylight. Maxwell Bodenheim, I think, had one among his early work, and perfect also is a poem of Carlos Williams about the wind on a window-pane.
    Williams brings me to a distinction that it is necessary to make in speaking of modern poets. Those I have spoken of are poets according to the old as well as the new reckoning; there are others who are poets only according to the new reckoning. They are headed by the doctor, Carlos Williams. Here is the poet whose expression derives from his life. He is a doctor. He loves bare facts. He is also a poet, he must recreate everything to suit himself. How can he reconcile these two selves?
    Williams will make a poem of a bare fact—just show you something he noticed. The doctor wishes you to know just how uncompromisingly itself that fact is. But the poet would like you to realize all that it means to him, and he throws that bare fact onto paper in such a way that it becomes a part of Williams’ own nature as well as the thing itself. That is the new rhythm.

Preceptors of Childhood
    or The Nurses of Maraquita
    I. Lilah
    Lilah was pale, and Maraquita loved her. She read her “Peep of Day,” a pretty book about a pretty man, that made her cry.
    Maraquita’s introduction to crying without being hurt for it.
    Lilah and Maraquita understood each other perfectly.
    They read “Peep of Day” all over again, and the sauce of the “Last Supper” tasted of tears.
    And Lilah wore a brooch of pale pink coral rose-buds, cool to the fingers.…
    One day Maraquita threw a domino through the window-pane, and was punished by Mamma.
    And after the psychic concussion, she was still alive.
    â€¦ And Lilah was still there—and once she had been governess in a jewish family in Hungary.
    And in Hungary you buried medlars under trees and dug them up when they were rotten.
    And a cavalry officer had galloped after the beautiful daughter of the family—and rode her down—because she was a jewess.
    So the world grew bigger than it had been … and Maraquita wondered where the domino went to, and she felt lonely, like the pretty man on the wooden cross.
    And Lilah had kind soft hands, but not very useful … and Maraquita was never going to set any store by useful things again.
    Lilah one morning wasn’t there any more … Maraquita wondered what it was about mornings, that made her wake up.
    II. Queenie
    She had large eyes.
    Maraquita feeling affectionate called her Black-beetle.
    And “Black-beetle,” who hadn’t lost all her fun yet, let her.
    But after a few more months had happened to her, she would rather Maraquita called her “Queenie.”
    Maraquita supposed she wanted to be called that way, because she hoped Victoria would die.
    She liked grand funerals.
    But Victoria wouldn’t die.
    And nothing happened.
    She was very clever at finding streets.
    All the streets were the same—bare and buff.
    Sometimes a richer house would have pillars painted a dull red.
    The more streets they saw—the less they had to say.
    â€œNext week will