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Minna (IX)

Sedate and archaic, a twilight-frilled haze
Walks over the meadows like rolled-out centuries
Quivering in sprightly welcome.
Trees pushed down by silence;
Trees lolling in comely abandon;
Trees pungently flamboyant,
Their leaves spinning in the wind’s golden elusiveness.
Trees probing the shrilly sensitive sunset
Like little, laced nightmares leaning
Upon a scarlet breast;
Trees sprinkling their stifled mockery
Upon the blue tomb of the air;
Trees, are you silenced beings
Whitening into the winding paradise
Of old loves seeking a second death?
And has this archaic, twilight-frilled haze
Moulded me to your semblance?

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 12, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Maxwell Bodenheim, born in 1892 in Hermanville, Mississippi, was a poet and novelist active in the early twentieth-century literary scenes of Chicago and New York’s Greenwich Village. He wrote many books, including Minna and Myself (Pagan Publishing Company, 1918); Advice (Alfred A. Knopf, 1920); Introducing Irony (Boni and Liveright, 1922); and the novel Blackguard (Covici-McGee Publishers, 1923).

About Maxwell Bodenheim

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About this Poem

“Minna (IX)” appeared in Minna and Myself (Pagan Publishing Company, 1918).

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More by this poet

Old Age

In me is a little painted square
Bordered by old shops, with gaudy awnings.
And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men,
Drinking sunlight.
The old men are my thoughts:
And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart,
And quietly unload supplies.
We fill slim pipes and chat,

Maxwell Bodenheim

1918

Rattlesnake Mountain Fable II

August sauntered down the mountain-side,
Dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay.
The air was like an old priest
Disrobing without embarrassment
Before the dark and candid gaze of night.
But these things brought no pause
To the saucily determined squirrel.
His eyes were hungrily upturned
To where the stars hung—icily clustered nuts
Dotting trees of solitude.
He saw the stars just over the horizon,
And they seemed to grow 
On trees that he could reach.
So he scampered on, from branch to branch,
Wondering why the fairy nut-trees
Ran away from him.
But, looking down, he spied
A softly wil

Maxwell Bodenheim

1920

Friendship

Grey, drooping-shouldered bushes scrape the edges

Of bending swirls of yellow-white flowers.

So do my thoughts meet the wind-scattered color of you.

A green-shadowed trance of water

Is splintered to little, white tasseled awakenings

By the beat of long, black oars.

So do my thoughts enter yours.

Split, brown-blue clouds press into each other

Over hills dressed in mute, clinging haze.

So do my thoughts slowly form

Over the draped mystery of you.

Maxwell Bodenheim

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Minna (IX)

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