Ezra Pound’s Proposition
- By Robert Hass
Beauty is sexual, and sexuality Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation For poets on the subject of finance, I thought of him in the thick heat Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you Outside the Shangri-la Hotel And says, in plausible English, “How about a party, big guy?” Here is more or less how it works: The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets, And the dam’s great turbines, beautifully tooled In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed By Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York, Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite, Spun by the force of rushing water, Have become hives of shimmering silver And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.