Collected Poems 1931-74 (21 page)

Orpheus, beloved famulus,

Know to us in a dark congeries

Of intimations from the dead:

Encamping among our verses—

Harp-beats of a sea-bird's wings—

Do you contend in us, though now

A memory only, the smashed lyre

Washed up entangled in your hair,

But sounding still as here,

O monarch of all initiates and

The dancer's only perfect peer?

In the fecund silences of the

Painter, or the poet's wrestling

With choice you steer like

A great albatross, spread white

On the earth-margins the sailing

Snow-wings in the world's afterlight:

Mentor of all these paper ships

Cockled from fancy on a tide

Made navigable only by your skill

Which in some few approves

A paper recreation of lost loves.

1955/
1955

Soft as puffs of smoke combining,

Mneiae—remembrance of past lives:

The shallow pigmentation of eternity

Upon the pouch of time and place existing.

I, the watcher, smoking at a table,

And I, my selves, observed by human choice,

A disinherited portion of the whole:

With you the sibling of my self-desire,

The carnal and the temporal voice,

The singing bird upon the spire:

And love, the grammar of that war

Which time's the only ointment for,

Which time's the only ointment for.

1955/
1955

Love on a leave-of-absence came,

Unmoored the silence like a barge,

Set free to float on lagging webs

The swan-black wise unhindered night.

(Bitter and pathless were the ways

Of sleep to which such beauty led.)

1955/
1955

The islands rebuffed by water.

Estuaries of putty and gold.

A smokeless arc of Latin sky.

One star, less than a week old.

Memory now, I lead her haltered.

Stab of the opiate in the arm

When the sea wears bronze scales and

Hushes in the ambush of a calm.

The old dialogue always rebegins

Between us: but now the spring

Ripens, neither will be attending,

For rosy as feet of pigeons pressed

In clay, the kisses we possessed,

Or thought we did: so borrowing, lending,

Stacked fortunes in our love's society—

Each in the perfect circle of a sigh was ending.

1955/
1955

Find time hanging, cut it down

All the universe you own.

Masterless and still untamed

Poet, lead the race you've shamed.

Lover, cut the rational knot

That made your thinking rule-of-thumb

And barefoot on the plum-dark hills

Go Wander in Elysium.

1960/
1955

Remember please, time has no joints,

Pours over the great sills of thought,

Not clogging nor resisting but

Yawning to inherit the year's quarters;

Weaving you up the unbroken series

Of corn, ammonites and men

In a single unlaboured continuum,

And not in slices called by day and night,

And not in objects called by place and thing.

You say I do not write, but the taverns

Have no clocks, and I conscripted

By loneliness observe how other drinkers

Sit at Strati's embalmed in reverie:

Forms raise green cones of wine,

And loaded heads recline on loaded arms,

Under a sky pronounced by cypresses,

Packed up, all of us, like loaves

Human and plant, memory and wish.

The very calendar props an empty inkwell.

1955/
1955

     I shall die one day I suppose

     In this old Turkish house I inhabit:

     A ragged banana-leaf outside and here

     On the sill in a jam-jar a rock-rose.

     Perhaps a single pining mandolin

     Throbs where cicadas have quarried

     To the heart of all misgiving and there

     Scratches on silence like a pet locked in.

     Will I be more or less dead

     Than the village in memory's dispersing

     Springs, or in some cloud of witness see,

     Looking back, the selfsame road ahead?

     By the moist clay of a woman's wanting,

     After the heart has stopped its fearful

     Gnawing, will I descry between

     This life and that another sort of haunting?

     No: the card-players in tabs of shade

     Will play on: the aerial springs

     Hiss: in bed lying quiet under kisses

     Without signature, with all my debts unpaid

     I shall recall nights of squinting rain,

     Like pig-iron on the hills: bruised

     Landscapes of drumming cloud and everywhere

     The lack of someone spreading like a stain.

     Or where brown fingers in the darkness move,

     Before the early shepherds have awoken,

     Tap out on sleeping lips with these same

     Worn typewriter keys a poem imploring

     Silence of lips and minds which have not spoken.

     1955/
1955

In an island of bitter lemons

Where the moon's cool fevers burn

From the dark globes of the fruit,

And the dry grass underfoot

Tortures memory and revises

Habits half a lifetime dead

Better leave the rest unsaid,

Beauty, darkness, vehemence

Let the old sea-nurses keep

Their memorials of sleep

And the Greek sea's curly head

Keep its calms like tears unshed

Keep its calms like tears unshed.

1960/
1955

The old Levant which made us once

So massive a nurse and a protector

Is quiet now under the moon. In waterglass

Four noons have swallowed her,

Black as a coalface to the Turkish coast.

Your village sleeps your

Little house is tucked away and locked.

I do not know any longer what to make

Of my feelings; for example, how our bodies

Entangled in water softly floated out

Beyond the limits of freewill, wet fingers

Touching…. No longer to be intimidated

By this empty beach, frail horned stars,

A victim of memory who could not say

How deft, how weightless are the kisses now

Which wake this unknown, the night sea,

Unlimbered here among its silver bars.

1980/
1955

I should set about memorising this little room,

The errors of taste which make it every other,

Like and unlike, this ugly rented bed

Now transfigured as a woman is transfigured

By love, disfigured, related and yet unrelated

To science, to the motiveless appeals of happiness.

I should set about memorising this room

It will be a long time empty and airless;

Thoughts will hang about it like mangy cats,

The mirror, vacant and idiotic as an actress

Reflect darkness, cavity of an old tooth,

A house shut up, a garden left untended.

This is probably the very moment to store it all,

Earlobes tasting of salt, a dying language

Of perfume, and the heart of someone

Hanging open on its hinges like a gate;

Rice-powder on a sleeve and two dead pillows

The telephone shook and shook but could not wake.

1956/
1955

I have brought my life to this point,

Down long staircases of wanhope

To this dead house, the heart, by

Dusty parallels, by pastures of desire,

By folly out of loneliness begotten, and

Nothing I learned has been forgotten.

Yet all this time you have been climbing

The same black beanstalks of the mind,

Through meadows of unshed tears,

Quite near me though unseen,

Depicted only by a shaking branch,

A voice weeping in a cloud

Or a commotion among the birds

In every silence there has been.

I have brought my life to this point

Where the paths in darkness cross.

Now wait for the one annealing word,

Belonging as spring rain to grass—

But how if she should pass and lose

The soft collision of these mortal worlds

Called by our names? Was it for this

The climbers set out for the heart of time

Never to know the unknown face

Or like a ghost of music to exchange

Only the bitter keepsake of a smile?

1980/
1955

From the dark viands of the church

His food in tortured verse he bore

Impersonating with each kiss

All that he feared of love and more,

For each must earn his thorny crown

And each his poisoned kiss,

Whoever quarries pain will find

By that remove or this

The sacrament the lovers took

In wine-dark verse suborned his book,

In every sensual measure heard

The chuckles of the daemon Word.

He saw the dark blood in the cup

Which one day drank his being up.

1960/
1955

She dreams she is chased by a black buck-nigger

But a fall in the coal-face blocks out the dream,

Something as long and lank as a lanyard,

Slow as a glacier, cold as cold cream—

Something inside her starts to scream …

Dreams she is chased by a man in a nightshirt,

Lawrence of Arabia dressed in a sheet:

Then locked by the crew of a Liberty Ship

With rows and rows and rows of refrigerated meat

While the voices keep repeating ‘Eat'.

Dreams she is handcuffed to a dancing-partner

And dragged round a roller-skating rink.

She swallows the ring on her wedding-finger

Falls through the ice but doesn't seem to sink

Though her party clothes begin to shrink.

Dreams she is queen of a mountain of cork,

Too hot to sit on, too cold to wear,

Naked, she pricks with a toasting-fork

A statue of Venus reclining there

With a notice saying: No charge for wear and tear.

She dreams she's a dog-team tugging poor Scott,

Sheer to the confines of the Pole:

Suddenly the Arctic becomes a-burning hot,

And when they arrive it's just an empty hole,

A geyser whistling in a mountain of coal.

Dreams she's the queen of a city-culture

Lovely as Helen but doomed to spoil:

Under her thighs roll the capital rivers,

The Rhine and the Volga flowing like oil.

Hamlet offers her a buttoned foil.

What has she got that we haven't got?

Isn't she happy and lovely too?

She dreams that her husband a bank-director

Locked in the Monkey-House at the Zoo—

Here's the clinical picture but what can we do?

1956/
1955

Bowed like a foetus at the long bar sit,

You common artist whose uncommon ends

Deflower the secret contours of a mind

And all around you pitying find

Like severed veins your earthly friends …

(
The
sickness
of
the
oyster
is
the
pearl
)

Dead bottles all around infect

Stale air the exploding corks bewitch—

O member of this outlawed sect,

Only the intolerable itch,

Skirt-fever, keeps the anthropoid erect.

Husband or wife or child condemn

This chain-gang which we all inherit:

Or those bleak ladders to despair

Miscalled high place and merit.

Dear, if these knotted words could wake

The dead boy and the buried girl …

(
The
sickness
of
the
oyster
is
the
pearl
)

1956/
1955