Collected Poems 1931-74 (14 page)

Suppose one died

Or ended this

This love like a long consumption,

Unlighted by a common kiss,

In desperation

To cut away, cut down,

This faithless hand

Like ivy clinging to your own,

Made solitariness not passion

The wild soul's iron ration …

Stars have winked out

A thousand year

But the numb star of death

The widow's mite and portion

Must never catch you here;

Only cut down and heal

Beneath the thorns of sense

And in this darkness dense

O feel again and find

The limb that will not bind.

Listen to them now,

The inner voices pleading:

‘Death would not be

Like separation is or changing,

But a deep luxurious bleeding:

Last of the malaises, like

The muzzle of a dog that drops

In the darkness to your lap:

Softly you could take the cue.

No one would be watching you.'

So one recalls

As if deep underground

The fortune-teller's promises;

Your body idle now as sound,

Green as the hanging-tree,

And your sad mouth

Whose leaves are printed here

Where sky and landscape meet

Like virgins lame of touch,

Smiles, but says nothing much.

And so the long long

Parting wears us both away

To winterfall and the return;

Softly every night

The great horned branch of heaven rises

With its blossoms white;

And time bleeds in us like a wound

While the forest of the future

Separating stands,

Reaching out its hands.

1946/
1946

To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,

Who move to their sweet undiscovered ends,

Or whom the great conspiracy deceives,

I wish these whirling autumn leaves:

Promontories splashed by the salty sea,

Groaned on in darkness by the tram

To horizons of love or good luck or more love—

As for me I now move

Through many negatives to what I am.

Here at the last cold Pharos between Greece

And all I love, the lights confide

A deeper darkness to the rubbing tide;

Doors shut, and we the living are locked inside

Between the shadows and the thoughts of peace:

And so in furnished rooms revise

The index of our lovers and our friends

From gestures possibly forgotten, but the ends

Of longings like unconnected nerves,

And in this quiet rehearsal of their acts

We dream of them and cherish them as Facts.

Now when the sea grows restless as a conscript,

Excited by fresh wind, climbs the sea-wall,

I walk by it and think about you all:

B. with his respect for the Object, and D.

Searching in sex like a great pantry for jars

Marked ‘Plum and apple'; and the small, fell

Figure of Dorian ringing like a muffin-bell—

All indeed whom war or time threw up

On this littoral and tides could not move

Were objects for my study and my love.

And then turning where the last pale

Lighthouse, like a Samson blinded, stands

And turns its huge charred orbit on the sands

I think of you—indeed mostly of you,

In whom a writer would only name and lose

The dented boy's lip and the close

Archer's shoulders; but here to rediscover

By tides and faults of weather, by the rain

Which washes everything, the critic and the lover.

At the doors of Africa so many towns founded

Upon a parting could become Alexandria, like

The wife of Lot—a metaphor for tears;

And the queer student in his poky hot

Tenth floor room above the harbour hears

The sirens shaking the tree of his heart,

And shuts his books, while the most

Inexpressible longings like wounds unstitched

Stir in him some girl's unquiet ghost.

So we, learning to suffer and not condemn

Can only wish you this great pure wind

Condemned by Greece, and turning like a helm

Inland where it smokes the fires of men,

Spins weathercocks on farms or catches

The lovers at their quarrel in the sheets;

Or like a walker in the darkness might,

Knocks and disturbs the artist at his papers

Up there alone, upon the alps of night.

1946/
1946

The rubber penis, the wig, the false breasts …

The talent for entering rooms backwards

Upon a roar of laughter, with his dumb

Pained expression, wheeling there before him

That mythological great hippo's bum:

‘Who should it be but Poggio?' The white face,

Comical, flat, and hairless as a cheese.

Nose like a member: something worn:

A Tuscan fig, a leather can, or else,

A phallus made of putty and slapped on.

How should you know that behind

All this the old buffoon concealed a fear—

And reasonable enough—that he might be

An artist after all? Always after this kind

Of side-splitting evening, sitting there

On a three-legged stool and writing, he

Hoped poems might form upon the paper.

But no. Dirty stories. The actress and the bishop.

The ape and the eunuch. This crapula clung

To him for many years between his dinners …

He sweated at them like a ham unhung.

And like the rest of us hoped for

The transfigured story or the mantic line

Of poetry free from this mortuary smell.

For years slept badly—who does not?

Took bribes, and drugs, ate far too much and dreamed.

Married unwisely, yes, but died quite well.

1946/
1946

A winter night again, and the moon

Loosely inks in the marbles and retires.

The six pines whistle and stretch and there,

Eastward the loaded brush of morning pauses

Where the few Grecian stars sink and revive

Each night in glittering baths of sound.

Now to the winter each has given up

Deciduous stuff, the snakeskin and the antler,

Cast skin of poetry and the grape.

Blind Homer, the lizards still sup the heat

From the rocks, and still the spring,

Noiseless as coins on hair repeats

Her diphthong after diphthong endlessly.

Exchange a glance with one whose art

Conspires with introspection against loneliness

This February 1946, pulse normal, nerves at rest:

Heir to a like disorder, only lately grown

Much more uncertain of his gift with words,

By this plate of olives, this dry inkwell.

1948/
1946

The ants that passed

Over the back of his hand,

The cries of welcome, the tribes, the tribes!

Happier men would have studied

Children, more baffling than pupae,

Their conversation when alone, their voices,

The dream at the tea-table or at geography:

The sense of intimacy when moving in lines

Like caterpillars entering a cathedral.

He refused to examine the world except

Through the stoutest glasses;

A finger of ground covered with pioneers.

A continent on a bay-leaf moving.

If real women were like moths he didn't notice.

There was not a looking-glass in the whole house.

Ah! but one day he might dress

In this black discarded business suit,

Fly heavily out on to the lawn at Arles.

What friendships lay among the flowers!

If he could be a commuter among the bees,

This pollen-hunter of the exact observation!

1946/
1946

Once in idleness was my beginning,

Night was to the mortal boy

Innocent of surface like a new mind

Upon whose edges once he walked

In idleness, in perfect idleness.

O world of little mirrors in the light.

The sun's rough wick for everybody's day:

Saw the Himalayas like lambs there

Stir their huge joints and lay

Against his innocent thigh a stony thigh.

Combs of wind drew through this grass

To bushes and pure lakes

On this tasteless wind

Went leopards, feathers fell or flew:

Yet all went north with the prayer-wheel,

By the road, the quotation of nightingales.

Quick of sympathy with springs

Where the stone gushed water

Women made their water like thieves.

Caravans paused here to drink Tibet.

On draughty corridors to Lhasa

Was my first school

In faces lifted from saddles to the snows:

Words caught by the soft klaxons crying

Down to the plains and settled cities.

So once in idleness was my beginning.

Little known of better then or worse

But in the lens of this great patience

Sex was small,

Death was small,

Were qualities held in a deathless essence,

Yet subjects of the wheel, burned clear

And immortal to my seventh year.

To all who turn and start descending

The long sad river of their growth:

The tidebound, tepid, causeless

Continuum of terrors in the spirit,

I give you here unending

In idleness an innocent beginning

Until your pain become a literature.

Nine marches to Lhasa.

Kùrseong: India The Nepalese ayah Kasim

Those who went forward

Into this honeycomb of silence often

Gained the whole world: but often lost each other.

In the complexion of this country tears

Found no harbour in the breast of rock.

Death marched beside the living as a friend

With no sad punctuation by the clock.

But he for whom steel and running water

Were roads, went westward only

To the prudish cliffs and the sad green home

Of Pudding Island o'er the Victorian foam.

Here all as poets were pariahs.

Some sharpened little follies into hooks

To pick upon the language and survive.

Some in search could only found

Pulpits of smoke like Blake's
Jerusalem.

For this person it was never landfall,

With so many representative young men

And all the old being obvious in feeling,

But like good crafty men

He saw the business witches in their bowlers,

The blackened Samsons of the green estate,

The earls from their cockney-boxes calling,

And knew before it was too late, London

Could only be a promise-giving kingdom.

Yet here was a window

Into the great sick-room, Europe,

With its dull set-books,

The Cartesian imperatives, Dante and Homer,

To impress the lame and awkward newcomer.

‘In Rimbaud the sense of guilt was atrophied, not conquered' Henry Miller

Here he saw Bede who softly

Blew out desire and went to bed,

So much greater than so many less

Who made their unconquered guilt in atrophy

A passport to the dead.

Here St. Augustine took the holy cue

Of bells in an English valley; and mad Jerome

Made of his longing half a home from home.

Scythes here faithfully mark

In their supple practice paths

For the lucky and unambitious owners.

But not a world as yet. Not a world.

Death like autumn falls

On the lakes its sudden forms, on walls

Where everything is made more marginal

By the ruling planes of the snow;

Reflect how Prospero was born to a green cell

While those who noted the weather-vane

In Beatrice's shadow sang

With the dying Emily: ‘We shall never

Return, never be young again'.

The defeat of purpose in days and lichens.

Some here unexpectedly put on the citizen,

Go walking to a church

By landscape rubbed in rain to grey

As wool on glass,

Thinking of spring which never comes to stay.

(The potential passion hidden, Wordsworth

In the desiccated bodies of postmistresses.

The scarlet splash of campion, Keats.

Ignorant suffering that closes like a lock.)

So here at last we did outgrow ourselves.

As the green stalk is taken from the earth,

With a great juicy sob, I turned him from a Man

To Mandrake, in Whose awful hand I am.

      Prospero upon his island

      Cast in a romantic form,

      When his love was fully grown

      He laid his magic down.

      Truth within the tribal wells,

      Innocent inviting creature

      Does not rise to human spells

      But by paradox

      Teaches all who seek for her

      That no saint or seer unlocks

      The wells of truth unless he first

      Conquer for the truth his thirst.

So one fine year to where the roads

Dividing Europe meet in Paris.

Paris H.V.M. Anaïs Nancy Teresa

The gnome was here and the small

Unacted temptations. Tessa was here whose dark

Quickened hair had brushed back rivers,

Trembling with stars by Buda,

In whose inconstant arms he waited

For black-hearted Descartes to seek him out

With all his sterile apparatus.

Now man for him became a thinking lobe,

Through endless permutations sought repose.

By frigid latinisms he mated now

To the hard frame of prose the cogent verb.

To many luck may give for merit

More profitable teachers. To the heart

A critic and a nymph:

And an unflinching doctor to the spirit.

All these he confined in metaphors,

She sleeping in his awkward mind

Taught of the pace of women or birds

Through the leafy body of man

Enduring like the mammoth, like speech

From the dry clicking of the greater apes

To these hot moments in a reference of stars

Beauty and death, how sex became

A lesser sort of speech, and the members doors.

Faces may settle sadly

Each into its private death

By business travel or fortune,

Like the fat congealing on a plate

Or the fogged negative of labour

Whose dumb fastidious rectitude

Brings death in living as a sort of mate.

‘All
bearings
are
true
'
.
The Admiralty Pilot

Here however man might botch his way

To God via Valéry, Gide or Rabelais.

All rules obtain upon the pilot's plan

So long as man, not manners, makyth man.

Some like the great Victorians of the past

Through old Moll Flanders sailed before the mast,

While savage Chatterleys of the new romance

Get carried off in Sex, the ambulance.

All rules obtain upon the pilot's chart

If governed by the scripture of the heart.

Now November visiting with rain

Surprises and humbles with its taste of elsewhere,

Licks in the draughty galleries there,

Like a country member quickened by a province,

Turning over books and leaves in haste,

Takes at last her slow stains of waste

Down the stone stairs into the rivers.

And in the personal heart, weary

Of the piercing innocents in parks

Who sail the rapt subconscious there like swans,

Disturbs and brightens with her tears, thinking:

‘Perhaps after all it is we who are blind,

While the unconscious eaters of the apple

Are whole as ingots of a process

Punched in matter by the promiscuous Mind.'

      By the waters of Buda

      We surrendered arms, hearts, hands,

      Lips for counting of kisses,

      Fingers for money or touch,

      Eyes for the hourglass sands.

      Uncut and unloosened

      Swift hair by the waters of Buda

      In the shabby balcony rooms

      Where the pulses waken and wonder

      The churches bluff one as heart-beats

      On the river their dull boom booms.

      By the waters of Buda

      Uncomb and unlock then,

      Abandon and nevermore cherish

      Queer lips, queer heart, hands.

      There to futurity leave

      The luckier lover who's waiting,

      As, like a spring coiled up,

      In the bones of Adam, lay Eve.

Corfu:
 
Greece
 

So Time, the lovely and mysterious

With promises and blessings moves

Through her swift degrees,

So gladly does he bear

Towards the sad perfect wife,

The rocky island and the cypress-trees.

Taken in the pattern of all solitaries,

An only child, of introspection got,

Her only playmates, lovers, in herself.

Nets were too coarse to hold her

Where the nymph broke through

And only the encircling arms of pleasure held.

Here for the five lean dogs of sense

Greece moved in calm memorial

Through her own unruffled blue,

Bearing in rivers upside down

The myrtle and the olive, in ruins

The faces of the innocents in wells.

Salt and garlic, water and dry bread,

Greek bread from the comb they knew

Like an element in sculpture:

By these red aerial cherries,

Or flawed grapes painted green

But pouted into breasts: as well

By those great quarries of the blood—

The beating crimson hearts of the grenades:

All far beyond the cupidity of verses

Or the lechery of images to tell.

Here worlds were confirmed in him.

Differences that matched like cloth

Between the darkness and the inner light,

Moved on the undivided breath of blue.

Formed moving, trees asserted here

Nothing but simple comparisons to

The artist's endearing eye.

Sleep. Napkins folded after grace.

Veins of stealing water

By the unplumbed ruins, never finding peace.

A watershed, a valley of tombs,

Never finding peace.

‘Look' she might say ‘Press here

With your fingers at the temples.

Are they not the blunt uncut horns

Of the small naked Ionian fauns?'

Much later, moving in a dark,

Snow-lit landscape softly

In her small frock walked his daughter

And a simile came into his mind

Of lovers, like swimmers lost at sea,

Exhausted in each other's arms,

Urgent for land, but treading water.

    Red Polish mouth,

    Lips that as for the flute unform,

    Gone round on nouns or vowels,

    To utter the accepting, calm

    ‘Yes', or make terrible verbs

    Like ‘I adore, adore'.

    Persuader, so long hunted

    By your wild pack of selves,

    Past peace of mind or even sleep,

    So longed for and so sought,

    May the divider always keep

    Like unshed tears in lashes

    Love, the undeclarèd thought.

Athens.
Katsimbalis,
Wallace
and
Anna
Southam.
Seferiades
Stephanides

Now earth turns her cold shoulders to us,

Autumn with her wild packs

Comes down to the robbing of the flowers.

On this unstained sky, printless

Snow moves crisp as dreamers' fingers,

And the rate of passion or tenderness

In this island house is absolute.

Within a time of reading

Here is all my growth

Through the bodies of other selves,

In books, by promise or perversity

My mutinous crew of furies—their pleading

Threw up at last the naked sprite

Whose flesh and noise I am,

Who is my jailor and my inward night.

‘Anya,
my
angel,
my
darling.
This
is
an
act
of
folly
I'
m
com
mitting,
a
feebleness,
a
crime,
I
know
it,
but
…'
Dostoevsky's
Letters
to
his
wife