Page 436 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on
rubies, leprous and winedark stones.
Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire,
evil, lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels

flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands,
root and root, gripe and wrest them.
She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with
garlic. A sailorman, rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum
and eyes her. A long and seafed silent rut. She dances,
capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips, on her
gross belly flapping a ruby egg.
Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished
again his gem, turned it and held it at the point of his
Moses’ beard. Grandfather ape gloating on a stolen hoard.
And you who wrest old images from the burial earth?
The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of
drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from
everlasting to everlasting.
Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny
trudged through Irishtown along London bridge road, one
with a sanded tired umbrella, one with a midwife’s bag in
which eleven cockles rolled.
The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of
dynamos from the powerhouse urged Stephen to be on.

435 of 1305