simonfeatherstone
This Futurist evocation of the percussive body animated by sex, by argument, by
violence(by war?) is followed by a wry evaluation of the very Futurist masculinity
that attracts her. ‘Trying for Love’, she comments, ‘Fantasy dealt them out as gods.’
The appeal of these fantastic gods is immediately questioned, however. ‘I had to
be caught in the weak eddy|Of your drivelling humanity|To love you most,’ she
asserts, softening the hardness of the ‘lighted bodies’ and reintroducing the debasing
discourse of mucous that began the sequence. The most wistful lyric of the series
follows this reduction of the ‘Superhuman’ to ‘drivelling humanity’. ‘We might
have lived together / In the lights of the Arno,’^22 she muses, imagining games, a
lullaby, and talk that suggest a return to the fantasy of intimacy and family that
appeared in Songs III and IV. But this moment of romance is ended by the most
disturbing poem of the sequence.
Song XVII is the central lyric in the series of thirty-four. It returns to Song
IV’s room and ‘fearful furniture’ and to an explicit acknowledgement of war as
an invasive force in personal life. It begins with despair and hallucination: ‘I don’t
care|Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to|Or what is hidden
in the shadows they stride.’ This eerie passage of domestic paranoia leads to an even
more disturbing vision:
Red a warm colour on the battle-field
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
From a round vacuum
Dilating with my breath^23War and the battlefield now occupy the bed not as metaphor but as blood, a tangible,
‘[h]eavy’ covering jarringly described as a domestic counterpane. Maeera Shreiber
and Eric Murphy Selinger have argued that the lyric alludes to an illicit abortion,
a loss which, like Song XVII itself, lies at the heart of the ‘Songs to Joannes’.^24 The
bed, the body, breath, and the touch of fingers, earlier signifiers of consuming, if
ambivalent passion, here return as markers of absolute loss. The ‘round vacuum’
occupies the centre of the space, mouth and uterus, dilating in a parody of birth,
and creating a centrifuge from which the sequence never quite escapes. ‘I am the
centre|Of a circle of pain|Exceeding its boundaries in every direction,’ Loy had
begun her earlier poem ‘Parturition’. In a ‘[v]acuum interlude’ in that evocation
(^22) Loy, ‘Songs to Joannes’, 58–9. (^23) Ibid. 60.
(^24) Maeera Shreiber, ‘ ‘‘Love is a Lyric|of Bodies’’: The Negative Aesthetics of Mina Loy’sLove Songs
to Joannes’, inidemand Keith Tuma (eds.),Mina Loy: Woman and Poet(Orona, Me.: National Poetry
Foundation, 1998), 101–5; Eric Murphy Selinger, ‘Love in the Time of Melancholia’, ibid. 31–2.