By Mina Loy

A silver LuciferLunar Baedeker…Lucifer A Baedeker is a series name of popular guidebooks. Another modern poem with “Baedeker” in the title is T. S. Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1919). Lucifer is the former angel name for Satan, which has been used to name the morning star, that is the planet Venus

serves

cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists

of adolescent thighs

draped

in satirical draperies

PerisPeris “In Persian myth, an elf or fairy, male or female, represented as a descendant of fallen angels, excluded from Paradise till their penance is accomplished” (Century Dictionary) in liveryin livery Dressed for their job

prepare

LetheLethe River of forgetfulness in Hades

for posthumous parvenuesparvenues Those who have recently come into wealth

Delirious Avenues

lit

with the chandelier souls

of infusoriainfusoria Class of protozoa; “so called because found in infusions of decaying animal or vegetable matter” (OED)

from Pharoah’s tombstones

lead

to mercurial doomsdaysdoomsdays The end of the world or Judgment Day, usually in the singular

Odious oasis

in furrowed phosphorousphosphorous “Phosphorous” (with a capital “P”) is Venus, the morning star, archaically referred to as Lucifer, mentioned in the first line of this poem.

the eye-white sky-light

white-light districtwhite-light district Possible alternative to red-light district. The term appears in Theodore Dreiser’s book A Hoosier Holiday (1916).

of lunar lusts

             StellectricStellectric A word formed from “stellar” (star) and “electric” signs

“Wing shows on Starway”

“Zodiac carrousel”

Cyclones

of ecstatic dust

and ashes whirl

crusaders

from hallucinatory citadels

of shattered glass

into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams   

browse on NecropolisNecropolis Literally: a city of corpses

From the shores

of oval oceans

in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed OdalisquesOdalisques “Female slaves or concubines in an Eastern harem” (OED)

and ornithologists

observe

the flight

of ErosEros God of Love in Greek mythology; also, the name of an asteroid, discovered in 1898 obsolete

And “Immortality”

mildews …   

in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”

“Crystal concubine”

Pocked with personification

the fossil virgin of the skies

waxes and wanes

• Nature

Poet Bio

Although born in England, Mina Loy worked as a poet and visual artist in Paris, Florence, and New York City, where her beauty and outlandish behavior shone at the center of several avant-garde circles. The eccentric vocabulary and syntax of Loy’s free-verse poems and their sardonic treatment of love can puzzle and offend, but no reader can question the work’s originality nor the poet’s fierce intelligence.

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