The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

Be wary, though, and never stir a step from your own ground. You have (for the first time in English) got French slang correct; but you clearly don’t know India, and some terrible old bore has planted the worst and feeblest form THE EQUINOX of a very stale cobra story on your innocence. There are several mistakes in these few pages—climate and natural history in particular. Figure to yourself that this bit of the book reads to me almost as Trléy reads to you !— THE YELLOW Wuat-Ho. A subterfuge in fugues. The Blue Grotto. No publisher. No price. No anything. 230 KING CROWLEY of Bronchitis-town To Bernard Smith of great renown To set his shaven soul at ease These laryngeal lymphanies. Where Digitalis roams among The Endotherms, and on the tongue Follicular papilla weave Their lustral locks, and rosy eve Sheds her soft toenails as she swings Her brilliant body into Spring’s, Befell a woe—and here the bard His sacral plexus with the yard Planged, and the Ammonites of Song Blew their shrill spirals loud and long. On y Cassiopeae first The grave old Hippocampus curst Black Oxyrrhynchus ! who would dare To camp in Berenice’s Hair ‘Whose vesper censers amorous Smoke monocotyledenous, What time the twisted ibex mars The parallax of double stars, And the pale hate of Vega flares, And swart Typhlitis next unbares His glaive, ere Granuloma gnashed His teeth, and on its shoulder gashed —That shoulder that had shrugged unmoved Though Os Innominatum loved! What happened after who can say? I wandered sadly by the bay, And saw anemon’ streamers wet Like drawers of scarlet flannelette ; Not by the Author of