William Pillin Ocean Park Pavane For A Fading Memory, 1963 reprinted in To The End Of Time, Poems New And Selected (1939-1979) Introduction by Charles Fishman; Illustrations by Polia Pillin, Papa Bach Editions: Los Angeles,1980, 1963.
William Pillin
Ocean Park
I confront the star-spell of the esplanade!
I walk as jaunty as a sailor
among fortune-tellers, dancers, gymnasts,
among gamblers, among all sorts of gypsies.
Necromantic presences mingle among us:
this cute whore is Phryne, sister of moonlights,
this old Jew under a streetlight is Merlin;
Shaharazad serves coffee and pancakes
and Sindbad lures the unwary with trinkets.
I have an illusion of freedom
and it may well be a prelude to trouble.
Who cares? This is a magical evening!
All things assume a novel succulence; clusters
of black grapes, sausages, pastries.
I am avid, like a cat in the jungle
seduced by a scent of musk or civet.
In blue-bright air flares are falling
to dissolve on restaurants, wineshops,
dance-halls and dimly lit interiors
from one of which (an obscure shrine of Pan?)
we hear a bacchic wail of clarinets.
Here is a café where Lesbians gather
and here is a place where, they tell me,
anything can happen. The unpredictable
lures like an unwritten poem. All else failing
one could shoot down a bomber or witness
a piquant disrobing in a penny arcade.
I turn sadly back to my curfewed suburb
of discreet doorways and subdued lamplights.
What is lacking here, what tang, what tonic?
Nocturnal laughters and musical whispers
have been exiled to the sea-edge
by the police and jeering merchants.
Held by a dangerous moonlight
between cold stones and colder water
life's subtle djinns clamor for release.
-0-
"William Pillin was born December 3, 1910, in what is now Zaporozhe in the Ukraine, the oldest son of Elconon and Anna Pillin . . . In 1917, [the family] moved to Simferopol, Crimea, . . . arriving in Chicago in 1923 . . .
" . . . [in 1927] he met Polia, a Polish immigrant who worked in the millinary trade and studied painting and sculpture in the evenings . . .
"In the mid-thirties, Pillin found a job with the Writer's Project of the WPA and worked on various state guidebooks, including those to Iowa, Illinois, and New Mexico. From 1936 to 1939, he and Polia lived on a farm in Santa Fe, New Mexico . . . They had their only son, Boris, who became a musician . . .
". . . [they ] discovered ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago . . . [they moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s.]"