Collected Poems 1931-74 (24 page)

The grave one is patron of a special sea,

Their symbol, food and common tool in one,

Yet chthonic as ever the ancients realised,

Noting your tips in trimmings kindled quick,

Your mauled roots roared with confused ardours,

Holding in heat, like great sorrows contained

By silence; dead branch or alive grew pelt

Refused the rain and harboured the ample oil

For lamps to light the human eye.

So the poets confused your attributes,

Said you were The Other but also the domestic useful,

And as the afflatus thrives on special discontents,

Little remedial trespasses of the heart, say,

Which grows it up: poor heart, starved pet of the mind:

They supposed your serenity compassed the human span,

Momentous, deathless, a freedom from the chain,

And every one wished they were like you,

Who live or dead brought solace,

The gold spunk of your berries making children fat.

Nothing in you being lame or fraudulent

You discountenanced all who saw you.

No need to add how turning downwind

You pierce again today the glands of memory,

Or how in summer calms you still stand still

In etchings of a tree-defining place.

1966/
1963

For how long now have we not nibbled

At the immediate past in this fashion, words,

Regretting our ignoble faculty of failing,

Slipping between whose fingers?

Melting between whose lips?

The disabused ruins of history's many

Many costumes we discarded.

The little shop has been pulled down

Where we bought stamps, tobacco, Easter ribbons.

A sort of little face now uprooted which

Once determined a whole order of joy,

Ruled over a pulse-rate, made so imperative

And magical the re-reading of a forgotten epic.

How everything in nature diminished

Or increased when it simply spoke!

We did not spot the scaffolding of bone

Until the last winter, the immense despondency

Once more gained full control, the immense despondency.

Old walls wrinkle into dust, windows

Poked out to render sightless

A city loyal to those handsome minds,

Her squares and parks designed for someone's loving.

The masons' picks have touched with their derision,

Unspare the whitewash of the old disorders,

Say what you like it's gone.

One blow can shatter the heroic vision.

1964/
1963

Reading him is to refresh all nature,

Where, newly elaborated, reality attends.

The primal innocence in things confronting

His eye as thoughtful, innocence as unstudied …

One could almost say holy in the scientific sense.

So while renewing nature he relives for us

The simple things our inattention staled,

Noting sagely how water can curl like hair,

Its undisciplined recoil moving mountains

Or drumming out geysers in the earth's crust,

Or the reflex stroke which buries ancient cities.

But water was only one of the things Leonardo

Was keen on, liked to sit down and draw.

It would not stay still; and sitting there beside

The plate of olives, the comb of stone honey,

Which seemed so eternal in the scale of values,

So philosophically immortal, he was touched

By the sense of time's fragility, the semen of fate.

The adventitious seconds, days or seasons,

Though time stood still some drowsy afternoon,

Became for him dense, gravid with their futurity.

Life was pitiless after all, advancing and recoiling

Like the seas of the mind. The only purchase was

This, deliberately to make the time to note:

‘The earth is budged from its position by the

Merest weight of a little bird alighting on it.'

1964/
1963

The horizon like some keystone between soil and air

Halves out all earth in quiet distribution,

In tones of dust or biscuit, particularly kind to

Loaves of the sunburnt soil the plough turned back,

Is merciful to marls in their haphazard colours,

Blood, rust, liver, tobacco, whatnot …

So far so good; but then comes the king-vine.

Winter slew so many but the old face it out,

Dynasties of sturdy cruciform manikins, their butt

The secateur snopped back, in circumcision,

Or spreadeagled helpless on a garden wall

And left to crucify into the small green

Pilot-leaf of flame, distrustful, lame, confiding,

The horns of snails; mind you, all of this

Before the wine's dark missile is foreseen.

And the human version matches—the stock thick.

Thighs roll to the whistle and snatch of scythes.

Bonemeal grows necks of rock and teeth like dice.

Their natural tutelary worship is the vine.

In it you can read the bloody caucus of the past,

Dour fuse of ageless feuds which smouldered out

Among these tumbled Roman walls and towers,

Either on the thorn-starred circle of the nights

Or here by day, this immensely quiet valley

Alive to the clicking of the pruners' toil.

1966/
1963

At the hub of Empire little Eros stands

Warming his testicles in chilly hands;

They dare not take him down before

They pass the anti-masturbation law.

But when at last the nation's purity

Is one day locked in firm security,

They'll shift the Roman exile for to be

The patron saint of our psychiatry.

1980/
1963

Soft toys that make to seem girls

In cool whitewash with two coral

Valves of lip printing each others' grease….

A clockwork Cupid's bow. Increase!

Their cherry-ripe hullo brims the open purse

Of eyes washed white by the marmoreal light;

So swaying as if on pyres they go

About the buried business of the night,

Cold witches of the elementary tease

Balanced on the horn of a supposed desire….

Trees shed their leaves like some of these.

1980/
1963

From recollection's fund

One ikon still can move,

Grey eyes, whose graphic doubt

Smile to the last remove.

Light candles and pour out

The slim wine in the glass,

Then softly frame your lips

To blow the darkness out,

In some forgotten room

In some forgiven town

Co-evals of a wish

Made half the darkness bloom.

O timepiece shedding time

Misprisoned by the dark,

Now running like a noose

Or spilling like a gland;

At leafpace gliding on

Or catching like a spark.

Foreknowledge of the end

Calm as the night's serene

Erasure of the light,

Two pupils of the sense

Knowing not where nor whence

Our history bleeds on.

It will not heed this wreath;

Two spendthrifts of the death

The dark bed held beneath.

1966/
1964

The hand is crabbed, the manuscript much defaced,

Fly-spotted and faint even in good light.

But it is clear that in search of an absolute

Precision, he found all faces, all brows placid.

Yet beneath the enigma gnawed him like an acid …

Men and women squirted into semblances,

Their hair growing up unpruned, foliage of eagles.

He wished to touch the angelic man,

To conquer the mystical spouse, his syzygy.

A vision of the soul flashed across him

With the great harpoon buried in her!

And by the great wound set free the whole

Wheat-ear and the epoptic mystery.

The black back-bone of death,

The gold back-bone of life,

Between them spheres of self-delusion,

War to the very knife.

The poor lame scholar cried out:

‘O ineffable chrism! O horn or flask!'

The laughter rolled about, thunder in gloves.

Steadily he traced back all the copies,

The undermeanings and deposits of the actual love.

My God! The great engine of the sky.

My God! The black monitors of the Cabiri,

The chirping and squeaking of the souls like bats,

The endless plumbline of his sighs—

‘Cri
d'une
âme
qui
fait
éclater

Son
enveloppe
charnelle.
Le
mal

Est
plus
grave
que
vous
ne
pensez
'

All critics quote it as excessive now.

‘He beholding the form like to himself

Existing in her, in her Very Water,

Loved it and willed to live it;

And with the will came the Act and so at last

In the due season of the fact

He vivified naked Form devoid of Reason.'

But down there in the obvious world Laïs

Is still somehow part of the canon of loss.

The cool persuasion of the smile exists,

Her style, though a mere sheath for love.

Yet she is still giving men apples printed

With the bite of her white teeth.

1964/
1964

Late seventeenth, a timepiece rusted by dew,

Candles, a folio of sketches where rotting

I almost found you a precarious likeness—

The expert relish of the charcoal stare!

The copies, the deposits, why the very

Undermeaning and intermeaning of your mind,

Everything was there.

Your age too, its preoccupations like ours …

‘The cause of death is love though death is all'

Or else: ‘Freedom resides in choice yet choice

Is only a fatal imprisonment among the opposites.'

Who told you you were free? What can it mean?

Come, drink! The simple kodak of the hangman's brain

Outstares us as it once outstared your world.

After all, we were not forced to write,

Who bade us heed the inward monitor?

And poetry, you once said, can be a deliverance

And true in many sorts of different sense,

Explicit or else like that awkward stare,

The perfect form of public reticence.

1966/
1964

Ah! French poet, confrere, who remaineth so

Obstinately
maudit,

Inhabiting for preference some deplorable

Taudis
:
who between spells of aristocratic

Lassitude explores the cosmic laws

Conjugating
amo
et
odi.

Sometimes you are ever so mildly
assouvi

By some rebarbative abstract movie,

But for the most part it is
le
néant

Which bemuseth or the
faux
néant

Not to mention the
fainéant
:

With what careful disdain you avoid
le
béant,

Staying within arm's reach of
le
puant

Never to affront
le
géant
…

Yea,
tonitruant
you revolve in
le
fuyant,

So countering the critic's cold rebuke

By getting and staying awfully
chnouk.

You carry your reader's head on the tallest pike,

Spit on kind hearts and coronets alike.

1980/
1965

The little gold cigale

Is summer's second god, the lovers know it,

His parched reverberating voice

Deepens the gold thirst of the noons

And follows the black sun's long

Fig-ripening and vine-mellowing fall

So leisurely from heaven's golden car

Day by successive day to end it all …

And where the Latin heat has stretched

The skin of valleys will his voice

Rubbing and scraping at the lover's ear

Oracles of past suns recall,

Prodigals of leisure and brown skins,

Wine mixed with kisses and the old

Dreamless summer sleeps they once enjoyed

In Adam's Eden long before the Fall.

1968/
1965

Beseech the great horned toad

To turn that jewelled head,

If beckonings won't prevail

Or voices from the dead,

Try memory's seditious brew

And turn he must to answer you.

Honey-gold the Great Bear's eye,

The spiral of a tripod's smoke,

Turn he must to answer you

In time's true-false moving quiet

All that memory dares evoke

Under a catafalque of stars

Hushed the marbles, choked the vase.

Once upon the Python spoke,

Now he lacks interpreters,

Withering in his laurelled fires

All the bitter rock inters,

From within those jewelled eyes

Tells you only what you know,

Know, but dare not realise.

1966/
1965