Collected Poems 1931-74 (30 page)

Come, meet me in some dead café—

A puff of cognac or a sip of smoke

Will grant a more prolific light,

Say there is nothing to revoke.

A veteran with no arm will press

A phantom sorrow in his sleeve;

The aching stump may well insist

On memories it can't relieve.

Late cats, the city's thumbscrews twist.

Night falls in its profuse derision,

Brings candle-power to younger lives,

Cancels in me the primal vision.

Come, random with me in the rain,

In ghastly harness like a dream,

In rainwashed streets of saddened dark

Where nothing moves that does not seem.

1973/
1971

Outside us smoulder the great

World issues about which nothing

Can be done, at least by us two;

Inside, the smaller area of a life

Entrusted to us, as yet unendowed

Even by a plan for worship. Well,

If thrift should make her worldly

Remind her that time is boundless,

And for call-girls like business-men, money.

Redeem pleasure, then, with a proximate

Love—the other problems, like the ruins

Of man's estate, death of all goodness,

Lie entombed with me here in this

Oldfashioned but convincing death-bed.

Her darkness, her eye are both typical

Of a region long since plunged into

Historic ruin; yet disinherited, she doesn't care

Being perfect both as person and as thing.

All winter now I shall lie suffocating

Under the débris of this thought.

1973/
197
1

Huit
heurs
…
honte
heurs
… supper will be cold.

Sex no substitute for

Science no worship for …

At night seeing lights and crouching

Figures round the swimming pool, rapt.

They were fishing for her pearls,

Her necklace had broken while she swam.

‘Darling, I bust my pearls.'

But all the time I was away

In sweet and headlong Greece I tried

To write you only the syntax failed,

Each noun became a nascent verb

And all verbs dormant adjectives,

Everything sleeping among the scattered pearls.

Corpses with the marvellous

Property of withoutness

Reign in the whole abundance of the breath.

Each mood has its breathing, so does death.

Soft they sleep and corpsely wise

Scattered the pearls that were their eyes.

Newly mated man and wine

In each other's deaths combine.

Somebody meets everything

While poems in their cages sing.

1973/
1971

Your ship will be leaving Penang

For Lisbon on the fourteenth,

When I have started pointedly

Living with somebody else.

Yet I can successfully imagine a

Star-crossed circumference of water

Providing a destiny for travellers—

Thoughts neither to pilfer nor squander

During the postcard-troubled nights.

How stable the feeling of being lost grows!

The ocean of memory is ample too,

It wheels about as you crawl over the surface

Of the globe, having cabled away a stormy wish.

Our judgement, our control were beyond all praise.

So prescient were we, it must prove something.

Madam, I presume upon somewhere to continue

Existing round you, say the Indian Ocean

Where life might be fuller of

Such rich machinery that you mightn't flinch;

And how marvellous to be followed

Round the world by a feeling of utter

Sufficiency, tinged a little, I don't doubt,

With self-righteousness, a calming emotion!

I too have been much diminished by wanting;

Now limit my vision to a sufficient loveliness,

To abdicate? But it was never our case,

Though somewhere I feel creep in

The word you said you hated most: ‘Nevertheless'.

Well, say it under whatever hostile stars you roam,

Embrace the blue vertigo of the old wish.

And if it gets too much for me

I can always do the other thing, remember?

1973/
1
971

At four the dawn mistral usually

A sleep-walking giant sways and crackles

The house, a vessel big with sail.

One head full of poems, cruiser of light,

Cracks open the pomegranate to reveal

The lining of all today's perhapses.

Far away in her carnal fealty sleeps

La
Môme
in her tiny
chambre
de
bonne.

‘Le
vent
se
lève
…
Il
faut
tenter
de
vivre.
'

I have grave thoughts about nothingness,

Hold no copyright in Jesus like that girl.

An autopsy would fuse the wires of pleading.

It is simply not possible to thank life.

The universe seems a huge hug without arms.

In foul rapture dawn breaks on grey olives.

Poetry among other afflictions

Is the purest selfishness.

I am making her a small scarlet jazz

For the cellar where they dance

To a wheezy accordion, with a one-eyed man.

Written to a cheeky begging voice.

             
Moi
je
suis

             
Annie
Verneuil

             
Dit
Annie
La
Môme

             
Parfois
je
fais
la
vie

             
Parfois
je
chome

         
Premier
Prix
de
Saloperie

         
De
Paris
à
Rome

             
Annie
La
Môme

         
Fléau
du
flic
le
soir

         
Sur
La
Place
Vendôme
,

             
Annie
Verneuil

             
Annie
La
Môme

Freedom is choice: choice bondage.

Where will I next be when the mistral

Rises in sullen trumpets on the hills of bone?

1973/
1971

Be silent, old frog.

Let God compound the issue as he must,

And dog eat dog

Unto the final desecration of man's dust.

The just will be devoured by the unjust.

1973/
1971

The big rivers are through with me, I guess;

Can't walk by Thames any more

But the inexpressible sadness settles

Like soft soot on dusk, becoming one whole thing,

Matchless as twilight and as featureless.

Yes, the big rivers are through with me, I guess;

Nor the mind-propelling, youth-devouring ones

Like Nile or Seine, or black Brahmaputra

Where I was born and never went back again

To stars printed in shining tar.

Yes, the big rivers, except the one of sorrows

Which winds to forts of calm where dust rebukes

The vagaries of minds in silent poses.

I have been washed up here or there,

A somewhere soon becoming an empty everywhere.

My memory of memories goes far astray,

Was it today, or was it yesterday?

I am thinking of things I would rather avoid

Alone in furnished rooms

Listening for those nymphs I've always waited for,

So silent, sitting upright, looking so unowned

And working my destiny on their marble looms.

1973/
1971

Time quietly compiling us like sheaves

Turns round one day, beckons the special few,

With one bird singing somewhere in the leaves,

Someone like K. or somebody like you,

Free-falling target for the envious thrust,

So tilting into darkness go we must.

Thus the fading writer signing off

Sees in the vast perspectives of dispersal

His words float off like tiny seeds,

Wind-borne or bird-distributed notes,

To the very end of loves without rehearsal,

The stinging image riper than his deeds.

Yours must have set out like ancient

Colonists, from Delos or from Rhodes,

To dare the sun-gods, found great entrepôts,

Naples or Rio, far from man's known abodes,

To confer the quaint Grecian script on other men;

A new Greek fire ignited by your pen.

How marvellous to have done it and then left

It in the lost property office of the loving mind,

The secret whisper those who listen find.

You show us all the way the great ones went,

In silences becalmed, so well they knew

That even to die is somehow to invent.

1973/
1972

A thirst for green, because too long deprived

Of water in the stone garrigues, is natural,

Accumulates and then at last gets sated

By this lake which parodies a new life

With a boat outside the window, breathing:

Negative of a greater thirst no doubt,

Lying on slopes of water just multiplying

In green verdure, distributed at night

All on a dark floor, the sincere flavour of stars …

This we called Vega, a sly map-reference

Coded in telegrams the censored name to

‘Vega next tenth of May. Okay?'

‘Okay.' ‘Okay.' You came.

The little train which joined then severed us

Clears Domodossola at night, doodles a way,

Tingling a single elementary bell,

Powdered with sequins of new snow,

To shamble at midnight into Stresa's blue.

One passenger only, a woman. You.

The fixed star of the ancients was another Vega,

A candle burning high in the alps of heaven,

Shielded by rosy fingers on some sill

Above some darkly sifted lake. They also knew

This silence trying to perfect itself in words.

Ah! The beautiful sail so unerringly on towards death

Once they experience the pith of this peerless calm.

1973/
1972

Katharine, Queen Eleanor's shadow hovers over you

And your birthdays must take a little from her history:

Be like her, both wise and gay

And keep the little touch of tragedy

Like swords of the soul.

1980/
1972

Seemingly upended in the sky,

Cloudless as minds asleep

One careless cemetery buzzes on and on

As if her tombstones were all hives

Overturned by the impatient dead—

We imagined they had stored up

The honey of their immortality

In the soft commotion the black bees make.

Below us, far away, the road to Paris.

You pour some wine upon a tomb.

The bees drink with us, the dead approve.

It is weeks ago now and we are back

In our burnt and dusty Languedoc,

Yet often in the noon-silences

I hear the Vaumort bees, taste the young wine,

Catch a smile hidden in sighs.

In the long grass you found a ring, remember?

A child's toy ring. Yes, I know that whenever

I want to be perfectly alone

With the memory of you, of that whole day

It's to Vaumort that I'll be turning.

1980/
1972

My lovely left-handed lover

Will be riding down from Geneva

On the afternoon Catalan bound for Barcelona.

I'll catch her all honeygold at Nîmes

And embrace her on behalf of the city council,

On behalf of Apollinaire, on behalf of Lou.

Ah, Lou, Lou, she is somewhat like you.

My lovely slowcoach, come, I'll teach you.

The Geneva train is faster than a river.

I am no laborious and insipid drone,

But an Irish poet, and thus perfectible.

Together we will submit

To the mesmerism of objects

Painted or hewn—and without too much cheating.

And all this nonsense about women's liberation

Will fade into the fifty-fifty of kisses shared.

Let us be enemies of intellectual cosiness.

Every embrace is an empirical exchange of vitamins.

Your last postcard from the dark lake read:

   
‘Se
réaliser?
Oui.
Mais
comment?

    Darling, I am buying a clockwork mouse

    To show my independence from men.

        Signed:
A REAL WOMAN
.'

Perhaps now do you see why?

1980/
1972