Collected Poems 1931-74 (19 page)

We, my dear Melissa, are only typics of

This Graeco-Roman asylum, dedicated here

To an age of Bogue, where the will sticks

Like a thorn under the tongue,

Making our accent pain and not completeness.

Do not interrupt me … Let me finish:

Madmen established in the intellect

By the domestic error of a mind that arranges,

Explains, but can never sufficiently include:

Punishes, exclaims, but never completes its arc

To enter the Round. Nor all the cabals

Of pity and endurance in the circus of art

Will change it till the mainspring will is broken.

Yet the thing can be done, as you say, simply

By sitting and waiting, the mystical leap

Is only a figure for it, it involves not daring

But the patience, being gored, not to cry out.

But perhaps even the desire itself is dying.

I should like that: to make an end of it.

It is time we did away with this kind of suffering,

It has become a pose and refuge for the lazy:

As for me I must do as I was born

And so must you: upon the smaller part of the circle

We desire fulfilment in the measure of our gift:

You kiss and make: while I withdraw and plead.

1948/
1948
 

Zarian was saying: Florence is youth,

And after it Ravenna, age,

Then Venice, second-childhood.

The pools of burning stone where time

And water, the old siege-masters,

Have run their saps beneath

A thousand saddle-bridges,

Puffed up by marble griffins drinking,

And all set free to float on loops

Of her canals like great intestines

Now snapped off like a berg to float,

Where now, like others, you have come alone,

To trap your sunset in a yellow glass,

And watch the silversmith at work

Chasing the famous salver of the bay …

Here sense dissolves, combines to print only

These bitten choirs of stone on water,

To the rumble of old cloth bells,

The cadging of confetti pigeons,

A boatman singing from his long black coffin …

To all that has been said before

You can add nothing, only that here,

Thick as a brushstroke sleep has laid

Its fleecy unconcern on every visage,

At the bottom of every soul a spoonful of sleep.

1955/
1950

All our religions founder, you

remain, small sunburnt
deus
loci

safe in your natal shrine,

landscape of the precocious southern heart,

continuously revived in passion's common

tragic and yet incorrigible spring:

in every special laughter overheard,

your specimen is everything—

accents of the little cackling god,

part animal, part insect, and part bird.

This dust, this royal dust, our mother

modelled by spring-belonging rain

whose soft blank drops console

a single vineyard's fever or a region

falls now in soft percussion on the earth's

old stretched and wrinkled vellum skin:

each drop could make one think

a footprint of the god, but out of season,

yet in your sudden coming know

life lives itself without recourse to reason.

On how many of your clement springs

the fishermen set forth, the foresters

resign their empty glasses, rise,

confront the morning star, accept

the motiveless patronage of all you are—

desire recaptured on the sea or land

in the fables of fish, or grapes held up,

a fistful of some champion wine

glowing like a stained-glass window

in a drunkard's trembling hand.

All the religions of the dust can tell—

this body of damp clay that cumbered so

Adam, and those before, was given him,

material for his lamp and spoon and body

to renovate your terra cotta shrines

whose cupids unashamed

to make a fable of the common lot

curled up like watchsprings in a kiss,

or turned to
putti
for a lover's bed,

or
amorini
for a shepherd's little cot.

Known before the expurgation of gods

wherever nature's carelessness exposed

her children to the fear of the unknown—

in families gathered by hopeless sickness

about a dying candle, or in sailors

on tilting decks and under shrouded planets:

wherever the unknown has displaced the known

you encouraged in the fellowship of wine

of love and husbandry: and in despair

only to think of you and you were there.

The saddle-nose, the hairy thighs

composed these vines, these humble vines,

so dedicated to themselves yet offering

in the black froth of grapes their increment

to pleasure or to sadness where a poor

peasant at a husky church-bell's chime

crosses himself: on some cracked pedestal

by the sighing sea sets eternally up,

item by item, his small mid-day meal,

garlic and bread, the wine-can and the cup.

Image of our own dust in wine!

drinkers of that royal dust pressed out

drop by cool drop in science and in love

into a model of the absconding god's

image—human like our own. Or else in other

mixtures, of breath in kisses dropped

under the fig's dark noonday lantern, yes,

lovers like tenants of a wishing-well

whose heartbeats labour through all time has stopped.

Your panic fellowship is everywhere,

Not only in love's first great illness known,

but in the exile of objects lost

to context, broken hearts, spilt milk,

oaths disregarded, laws forgotten:

or on the seashore some old pilot's

capital in rags of sail, snapped oars,

water-jars choked with sand,

and further on, half hidden, the fatal letter

in the cold fingers of some marble hand.

Deus
loci
your provinces extend

throughout the domains of logic,

beyond the eyes watching from dusty murals,

or the philosopher's critical impatience

to understand, to be done with life:

beyond beyond even the mind's dark spools

in a vine-wreath or an old wax cross

you can become the nurse and wife of fools,

their actions and their nakedness—

all the heart's profit or the loss. 

So today, after many years, we meet

at this high window overlooking

the best of Italy, smiling under rain,

that rattles down the leaves like sparrow-shot,

scatters the reapers, the sunburnt girls,

rises in the sour dust of this table,

these books, unfinished letters—all

refreshed again in you O spirit of place,

Presence long since divined, delayed, and waited for,

And here met face to face.

1955/
1950

Stavro's dead. A truant vine

Grows out of him at either end

Like muscles through the trunk and spine

For wine was Stavro's closest friend.

Up through the barrel of the chest

To scatter on his polished dome

A vine-leaf from the poet's crown.

The pint-pot was his only home.

Out of this confusing paste

The best of us are only made,

Sleep and sloth and wine were his

Who drank and drank and never paid.

Beauty vomit truth and waste

Somehow joined to give him grace

Who clasped the sky's blue demijohn

Drunk, in a drowning man's embrace.

Silenus of these olive-groves

He broached a wine-dark universe

And tasted on the crater's brim

Mother lover hearth and nurse.

The vulgar grape his earthly task:

Wine was a cradle, muse and guide,

Till body like some leather flask

Matured a laughing sun inside.

His bounty was life's usufruct:

Such lips to lay at nature's breast

With earth below and sky above,

Till tapsters lay us all to rest.

Stained tablecloths for epitaphs!

Set us full glasses nose to nose!

Good drunkards, pledge him with your laughs

Before the city's taverns close.

1968/
1950

You saw them, Sabina? Did you see them?

Yet the education of this little cloud

Full of neglect, allowed remissly so to lie

Unbrushed in some forgotten corner

Of a Monday-afternoon-in-April sky …

The rest abandoned it in passing by,

The swollen red-eyed country-mourners,

Unbarbered, marching on some Friday-the-thirteenth.

They knew it was not of the savage

Winter company, this tuffet for a tired cherub,

But a dear belonging of the vernal age,

Say spring, provinces of the nightingale,

Say love, the ministry of all distresses,

Say youth, Sabina, let us call it youth—

All the white capes of fancy seen afar!

1955/
1950

Trembling they appear, the Siren isles,

Bequeathing lavender and molten rose,

Reflecting in the white caves of our sails

Melodious capes of fancy and of terror,

Where now the singers surface at the prow,

Begin the famous, pitiless, wounded singing …

Ulysses watching, like many a hero since,

Thinks: ‘Voyages and privations!

The loutish sea which swallows up our loves,

Lying windless under a sky of lilac,

Far from our home, the longed-for landfall …

By God! They choose their time, the Sirens.'

Every poet and hero has to face them,

The glittering temptresses of his distraction,

The penalties which seek him for a hostage.

Homer and Milton: both were punished in their gift.

1955/
1951

Scent like a river-pilot led me there:

Bedroom darkness spreading like a moss,

The polished wells of floors in blackness

Gave no reflections of the personage,

Or the half-open door, but whispered on:

‘Skin be supple, hair be smooth,

Lips and character attend

In mnemonic solitude.

Kisses leave no fingerprints.'

‘Answer.' But no answer came.

‘Beauty hunted leaves no clues.'

Yet as if rising from a still,

Perfume whispered at the sill,

All those discarded husks of thought

Hanging untenanted like gowns,

Rinds of which the fruit had gone …

Still the long chapter led me on.

Still the clock beside the bed

Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

1955/
1951

curled like a hoop in sleep

unearthly of manufacture,

tissue of blossom and clay

bone the extract of air

fountain of nature.

softly knitted by kisses,

added to stitch by stitch,

by sleep of the dying heart,

by water and wool and air,

gather a fabric rich.

earth contracted to earth

in ten toes: the cardinals.

in ten fingers: the bishops.

ears by two, eyes by two,

watch the mirror watching you,

       and now hush

the nightwalkers bringing peace,

seven the badges of grace

five the straw caps of talent,

one the scarf of desire, go

mimic your mother's lovely face.

1955/
1951

    The baby emperor,

reigning on tuffet, throne or pot

in his minority knows hardly what

    he is, or is not,

    sagely he confers

his card of humours like a vane,

veering by fair to jungle foul

    so shapes his course

through variable back to fine again.

        Then

fingers dangle over him: beanstalks,

chins like balconies impend:

kisses like blank thunder bang

    above the little mandarin,

or like a precious ointment prest

from tubes are different kisses

    to the suffrage of a grin.

    He can outface

a hundred generations with a yawn

    this Faustus of the pram,

spreadeagled like a starfish, or

    some uncooked prawn

with pink and toothless mandible

    advance the proposition:

        ‘I

    cry, therefore I am.'

    the baby emperor

    O lastly see

in exile on his favourite St. Helena,

corner of a lost playground gazing

    into a dark well,

manufacturing images of a lost past,

expense of spirit in a waste of longing,

    sea-nymphs hourly

    ring his knell.

    small famulus of Time!

born to the legation of our dark unknowing

    the seed was not of your

sowing, nor did you make these tall

    untoppled walls

to sit here like a prisoner remembering

    only as a poem now

    the past, the white breasts

that once leaned over you like waterfalls.

1955/
1951