Collected Poems 1931-74 (20 page)

The forest wears its coats

of oil-paint as lightly can

what only brush-strokes built,

feather and leaf and spray,

married by choice and plan.

Curve of the Danube's wrist

leans from its mossy bed,

takes the bias of earth with it

the camber of earth and sky,

divides with a ruler of lead.

Soft as an ant's patrol

fingers to fingers warm,

to relive in a favourite's touch,

warm as the oven-loaf,

to finger and wrist and arm.

We know that the dead forget:

the living reside in touch,

sweet consonance of a kiss,

or a letter from distant home,

says little and yet so much.

So much yet never enough

in the concert of night and day,

but revisit us like the dead

kisses that rise to our lips

confused in the river's spray.

Dead kisses revisit the living

in guises our bodies abet,

for mouth or elbow or thigh:

for the living must always remember

what the dead can never forget.

1955/
1951

Bosnia. November. And the mountain roads

Earthbound but matching perfectly these long

And passionate self-communings counter-march,

Balanced on scarps of trap, ramble or blunder

Over traverses of cloud: and here they move,

Mule-teams like insects harnessed by a bell

Upon the leaf-edge of a winter sky,

And down at last into this lap of stone

Between four cataracts of rock: a town

Peopled by sleepy eagles, whispering only

Of the sunburnt herdsman's hopeless ploy:

A sterile earth quickened by shards of rock

Where nothing grows, not even in his sleep,

Where minarets have twisted up like sugar

And a river, curdled with blond ice, drives on

Tinkling among the mule-teams and the mountaineers,

Under the bridges and the wooden trellises

Which tame the air and promise us a peace

Harmless with nightingales. None are singing now.

No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous

Dark beauty flowering under veils,

Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style:

A village like an instinct left to rust,

Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

1955/
1951

‘Spring' says your Alexandrian poet

‘Means time of the remission of the rose'

Now here at this tattered old café,

By the sea-wall, where so many like us

Have felt the revengeful power of life,

Are roses trapped in blue tin bowls.

I think of you somewhere among them—

Other roses—outworn by our literature,

Made tenants of calf-love or else

The poet's portion, a black black rose

Coughed into the helpless lap of love,

Or fallen from a lapel—a night-club rose.

It would take more than this loving imagination

To claim them for you out of time,

To make them dense and fecund so that

Snow would never pocket them, nor would

They travel under glass to great sanatoria

And like a sibling of the sickness thrust

Flushed faces up beside a dead man's plate.

No, you should have picked one from a poem

Being written softly with a brush—

The deathless ideogram for love we writers hunt.

Now alas the writing and the roses, Melissa,

Are nearly over: who will next remember

Their spring remission in kept promises,

Or even the true ground of their invention

In some dry heart or empty inkwell?

1955/
19
53

The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint,

And earth's huge camber follows out,

Turning in sleep, the oceanic curve,

Defined in concave like a human eye

Or cheek pressed warm on the dark's cheek,

Like dancers to a music they deserve.

This balcony, a moon-anointed shelf

Above a silent garden holds my bed.

I slept. But the dispiriting autumn moon,

In her slow expurgation of the sky

Needs company: is brooding on the dead,

And so am I now, so am I.

1955/
1953

19 February 1952

     So many mockers of the doctrine

     Turn away, try not to hear

     The antinomian butchers

     In the grape-vine of ideas.

     It is we who observe who suffer,

     We who confide who lie …

     They are pulling and snapping

     The disordered vine-limbs, Dionysus,

     The body of our body once divine,

     Replacing the coveted order of desire

     With all the lumber love can leave,

     A star entombed in flesh, desirelessness,

     In some ghostly bedroom rented for a night.

22 February 1952

     Connive, Connive,

     For the great wheel is turning

     Under the politics of the hive.

     Connive, for everywhere

     Hermits and patron-saints

     On the great star-wheel crucified

     Pinned out lie burning, burning,

     And life is being delivered to the half-alive.

24 February 1952

     Old cock-pheasants when you hit one

     Lumber and burst upon the ground,

     The body's plump contraption splits

     Their lagging rainbow into bits.

     So marriage can, by ripeness bound,

     From over-ripeness qualify

     To sick detachment in the mind—

     Dreams bursting at the seams to die

     By colder coitus in the mind of God,

     Stitches ripped up which used to hold

     The modern heart from growing cold.

     Now logic founders, speech begins.

     Symbols sketch a swaying bridge

     Between the states at peace or war,

     Athens or Sparta fighting for

     What foolish head or fond heart wins.

     Much later will the lover coax

     Out of the bestiary of his heart

     The little hairy sexer, Pan,

     The turning-point—pure laughter,

     To make the reckoning round and full

     If Jill comes tumbling after.

     He lies in his love in shadowless content

     As tongue in mouth, as poems in a skull.

27 February 1952

     Jupiter, so lucky when he lay

     Trampling among the roses: bodies

     Of young girls … a cage of sighs

     Beside a drifting river-picture

     Was all the poet wished in youth;

     But later saw the glistening dewlap

     Of the man-bull, heard the cries,

     The squat consorts of the passion

     Twisted like figs into the legs

     Of washerwomen screeching on the Liffey,

     Soaping the flaccid thighs and dugs,

     Remagnetized again by thoughts of old

     Familiar, incoherent, measureless

     Contempts the grabbing flesh must

     Always hold, like thefts from human logic,

     And savour till the gums and spices fade.

3 January 1953

     Dear, behind the choking estuaries

     Of sleep or waking, in the acts

     Which dream themselves and make,

     Swollen under luminol, responsibilities

     Which no one else can take,

     I watch the faultless measure of your dying

     Into an unknown misused animal

     Held by the ropes and drugs; the puny

     Recipe society proposes when machines

     Break down. Love was our machine.

     And through each false connection I

     So clearly pierce to reach the God

     Infecting this machine, not ours but by

     Compulsion of the city and the times;

     A God forgetting slowly how to feel:

     A broken sex which, lying to itself,

     Could never hope to heal.

     It was so simple to observe the liars,

     The one impaled, and lying like a log,

     The other at some fountain-nipple drinking

     His art from the whole world, helplessly

     Disbanding reason like a thirsty dog.

6 January 1953

     Madness confides its own theology,

     An ape-world bleak in its custom:

     Not arbitrary, for even the delusive

     Lies concert inside their dissonance:

     And are apes less human than

     Humans are to each other? Answer.

     In clinic beds we reach to where

     All cultures intersect, inverted now

     By the hungry heart and jumbled out

     In friends or sculpture or kissing-stuff,

     Measured against the chattering

     Of gross primary desires, a code of needs

     Where Marxist poems are born and die perhaps.

     The white screens they have set up

     Like the mind's censor under Babel

     Are trying to keep from the white coats

     All possible foreknowledge of the enigma.

     But the infected face of loneliness

     Smiles back wherever mirrors droop and bleed.

9 January 1953

     Imagine we are the living who inhabit

     Freezing offices in a winter town,

     Who daily founder deeper in

     Our self-disdain being mirrored in

     Each others' complicated ways of dying.

     Here neither brick nor glass can warm

     The sanitary dust of central heating,

     And the damp air like a poultice wets

     The fears of living which thought begets.

     Here we feed, as prisoners feed, spiders

     Important to the reason as Bruce's was;

     Huge sprawling emotions kept in bottles

     Below the civil surface of the mind,

     That snap and sway upon the webs

     Of tearless resignation bought with sleep.

     Some few have what I have:

     Silent gold pressure of eyes

     Belonging to one deeply hurt, deeply aware.

     Truly though we never speak

     The past has marked us each

     In different lives contending for each other:

     We bear like ancient marble well-heads

     Marks of the ropes they lowered in us,

     Telling of the concerns of time,

     The knife of feeling in the art of love.

12 January 1953

     So at last we come to the writer's

     Middle years, the hardest yet to bear,

     All will agree: for it is now

     He condenses, prunes and tries to order

     The experiences which gorged upon his youth.

     Every wrinkle now earned is gifted,

     Every grey hair tolls. He matches now

     Old kisses to new, and in the bodies

     Of younger learners throws off his sperm

     Like lumber just to ease the weight

     Of sighing for their youth, his abandoned own;

     And in the coital slumber poaches

     From lips and tongues the pollen

     Of youth, to dust the licence of his art.

     You cannot guess how he has been waiting

     For these years, these ripe and terrible

     Years of the
agon;
with the athlete's

     Calm foreknowledge of a deathly ripeness,

     Facing perhaps a public death by blows,

     Or a massive sprain in the centre of his mind,

     The whole world; his champion fever glows

     With all the dark misgivings of the bout.

     But now even fear cannot despoil the body

     And will, trained for the even contest,

     Fed by the promise of his country's laurels.

     So, having dispossessed himself, and being

     Now for the first time prepared to die

     He feels at last trained for the second life.

     1955/
1954

You gone, the mirrors all reverted,

Lay banging in the empty house,

Redoubled their efforts to impede

Waterlogged images of faces pleading.

So Fortunatus had a mirror which

Imperilled his reason when it broke;

The sleepers in their dormitory of glass

Stirred once and sighed but never woke.

Time amputated so will bleed no more

But flow like refuse now in clocks

On clinic walls, in libraries and barracks,

Not made to spend but kill and nothing more.

Yet mirrors abandoned drink like ponds:

(Once they resumed the childhood of love)

And overflowing, spreading, swallowing

Like water light, show one averted face,

As in the capsule of the human eye

Seen at infinity, the outer end of time,

A man and woman lying sun-bemused

In a blue vineyard by the Latin sea,

Steeped in each other's minds and breathing there

Like wicks inhaling deep in golden oil.

1955/
1954