"DELIRIUM FLAPPING ITS THIGH-BONES!"
SHOUTS AUNTIE GRIZELDA
It was said
( though never to her face )
that Aunt had given
her maidenhead too eagerly easily
- away.
But being underwhelmed
by the whole process
gave it up as
a bad lot and
became instead a faux
maiden aunt.
Her world intact.
Unlike other ladies she
smoked a pipe.
Her beloved Maigret
so permeated with pipe smoke that
one could never read them
a minute or more before
succumbing to the smell.
Her books death to the non-smoker.
It also served to preserve her
for far more than her natural
span &
it came as a great surprise
that she could ever die but
...die she did.
The hyacinths in bowl after bowl
wondering where she had gone
and why the dusting had not been
done.
A great silence
filling up the room.
***
Aunt Grizelda would often recite Amy Lowell's poem and would use this phrase when she wanted to curse without cursing. If you heard this Lowell line then you knew she was mad! An old old man with the silverest of hair told me about his aunt 'cos he saw I was reading about the Imagists on a train heading into the long long ago.
I would have loved to have encountered her.
This is the end of the first movement of her STRAVINSKY'S THREE PIECES
"Bang! Bump! Tong!
Petticoats,
Stockings,
Sabots,
Delirium flapping its thigh-bones;
Red, blue, yellow,
Drunkenness steaming in colours;
Red, yellow, blue,
Colours and flesh weaving together,
In and out, with the dance,
Coarse stuffs and hot flesh weaving together.
Pigs' cries white and tenuous,
White and painful,
White and --
Bump!
Tong!"