The Lion and the Rose (6 page)

Like dark through the leaves, like dew

On the strawberry early in the morning,

Silence like deep cool wells

In a desert treeless and burning,

O my darling, O my darling.

When I imagine how and what to send

It is never the leaden weight of a word,

Not such a weight, world without end.

A god could do with a leaf or a bird,

A god could pour out love

In a silent shower of gold:

Images and symbols are all I have,

O my child, O my child.

MAGNET

I am becoming very heavy here alone:

Stones must feel gravity like this,

To be nothing, nothing but a heaviness

Leaning and leaning toward stone.

This is the full weight of a kiss

That was as subtle as a leaf’s caress.

So light I lay upon your fragile breast,

So heavy now the fiery buried stream,

So heavy now the eyes within my head,

The long sigh of the flesh that cannot rest,

The weight unbearable, implacable, extreme

Of bones that creak with longing for their bed,

And earth as well as you now holds me fast.

My body leans toward you, plangent,

Falls heavy and straight as a meteor

That hurls the night apart without a tangent

To find the point of gravity where you are.

QUESTION

I saw the world in your face

And it was fearful loneliness,

As if the self were in disgrace;

I saw the heart of emptiness

And thought that I was fashioned then

To be the mirror of your pain.

To be the witness only, be

The mirror, the crystalline eye

That treats grief as anatomy

To read the world’s ill by,

The haunted witness of

Our lack of love, our lack of love.

But now I move with you as one,

The ghost within your skeleton,

And ask and ask the only question:

How can we live and this go on?

How shall the naked starving soul

Be fed, be clothed, and be made whole?

My child, my world, my dear,

Balm of my heart, joy so severe

You hold within a single tear

All of our human anguish clear,

How will this arduous joy you have

Be yours, be mine, without your love?

When will you give yourself all that you are,

O world of pain, O lucid morning star?

THREE SONNETS

I

Is your heart stiff and sore parted from me

As mine in this strange absence from your love,

As if it were enlarged and could not more

Except with pain, it beats so heavily?

And is your mind so charged with loneliness

Nothing you look upon is real or fair?

As mine that knows a constant still despair

As if this garden were a wilderness,

And the familiar flowers suddenly strange,

The tree I loved now frightening and unknown

Standing beside me when I walk alone,

And all my thoughts diminished in their range

To the one piercing thought: I am divided

From one whose love for me is undecided.

II

All joys are sharper now I am in pain;

I understand the depths of happiness

And I have visions and am young again,

As when accompanied by your loveliness

I seemed to understand and wished to share

The depths of sorrow and was close to grief,

Felt my heart open to the world’s despair—

O, when you loved me great was my belief,

My need to serve, and sweet was this desire,

For happiness was something that I had

And the pure tears rose softly from the fire,

But now that I am less wise, being sad,

Joy is so sharp a memory, that my faith

Seems bound up in the drawing of your breath.

III

The doubts move inward as the circle narrows;

We have left the world now. It is not the world

That pierces us with these hard-driven arrows,

But heart against heart is now naked hurled.

They jar upon each other and the blow

Bruises both equally, so close they are;

For now we see there is no separate sorrow

In this strange union and this stranger war,

Where two so bound by love, they feel as one

Are rigid with a power that still denies—

The tension grows. The circle narrows down,

Until it is two pairs of haunted eyes:

By love bound, by love wounded, still we stand

Like two Sebastians, pierced, and hand in hand.

PERSPECTIVE

Now I am coming toward you silently,

Do not say anything. Stay as you are—

Suspense between my love and your despair.

Like a stone figure on a fountain, be

The center of an arc of paths and trees.

Now I am coming toward you, freeze!

Be nothing but yourself, not even mine,

You as you are when all alone and free,

Suspended outside love and outside time—

Look at me as I am, as if I were a tree.

Now I am coming toward you, say nothing,

Shine in your own light, purer than my joy,

And I shall, coming toward you, make no cry,

But try to sense the nearness and the space

Between my windswept leaves and your still face,

Between the tree and the stone figure drawn

Together, if at all, by shadow or some simple dawn.

RETURN

It is time I came back to my real life

After this voyage to an island with no name,

Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.

Here are books, paper, and my little knife,

The walls of solitude from which I came,

Here is the sobering, meditative night,

The quiet room where it is dark and cool,

After the intense green and the flame,

The flat white walls, the table are each good.

Long hours of work and the imposed rule:

That was the time of the tremendous rain,

The place of lightning, of the great flood.

This is the time when voyagers return

With a mad longing for known customs and things,

Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.

What was fire is music. Then the heart was torn.

But tears are indulgence. Memory sings.

I speak of an island. Passion is the word.

“O SAISONS! O CHATEAUX!”

When I landed it was coming home,

Home to all anguish, conflict and all love,

The heart stretched as the seasons move,

Summer is white roses and purple fox-glove,

Spring was a crimson tulip standing alone.

We only keep what we lose.

O seasons, O castles, O splendor of trees!

The star of avenues and the triumphant square,

And in the Metro once a woman with red hair,

The weary oval face and tense France there,

Too few roots now, too many memories.

We only keep what we lose.

The dark gloom of the forest and my dream,

The clouds that make the sky a tragic spell

And windows that frame partings in a well:

You bent down from a balcony to say farewell.

Across lost landscapes the trains scream.

We only keep what we lose.

Parting freezes the image, roots the heart.

Once spring was a tulip standing alone,

Summer is a forest of roses and green.

No one will see again what I have seen.

And I possess you now from whom I part:

We only keep what we lose.

TO THE LIVING

THESE PURE ARCHES

A painting by Chirico: “The Delights of The Poet”

Here space, time, peace are given a habitation,

Perspective of pillar and arch, shadow on light,

A luminous evening where it can never be night.

This is the pure splendor of imagination.

To hold eternally present and forever still

The always fugitive, to make the essence clear,

Compose time and the moment as shadow in a square,

As these pure arches have been composed by will.

As by a kind of absence, feat of super-session

We can evoke a face long lost, long lost in death,

Or those hidden now in the wilderness of oppression—

Know the immortal breath upon the mortal breath:

A leaping out of the body to think, the sense

Of absence that precedes the stem work of creation.

Now when the future depends on our imagination,

Remember these pure arches and their imminence,

The luminous scene where space and time are held

At peace forever. All lives will be in peril,

The love be wasted and the forms of peace be sterile

Unless the mandates of imagination are fulfilled.

WE HAVE SEEN THE WIND

New England Hurricane, 1938

We have seen the wind and we need not be warned.

It is no plunderer of roses. It is nothing sweet.

We have seen the torturer of trees, O we have learned

How it bends them, how it wrenches at their rooted feet,

Till the earth cracks like a cake round their torn feet.

We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes go down,

The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall,

The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown,

The pine crack at the base—we had to watch them all.

The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall.

They went so softly under the loud flails of air,

Before that fury they went down like feathers,

With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair,

And all the years, endured in all the weathers—

To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.

Do not speak to us of the wind. We know now. We know.

We do not need any more of destruction than all these,

These that were proud and great and still so swift to go,

Do not speak to us any more of the carnage of the trees,

Lest the heart remember other dead than these—

Lest the heart split like a tree from root to crown,

And bearing all its springs, like a feather go down.

HOMAGE TO FLANDERS

Country of still canals, green willows, golden fields, all

Laid like a carpet for majestic winds to tread,

Where peace is in the lines of trees, but overhead

Heaven is marching: low lands where winds are tall,

Small lands where skies are the huge houses of the lark,

Rich lands where men are poor and reap what they have sown,

Who plant the small hugged acre where each works alone,

Men who rise with the sun and sleep with the early dark.

These are the country’s marrow, these, who work the land,

Passionate partisans and arguers but who still go on,

Whoever governs, planting the same seed under the same sun,

These who hold Flanders like a plough in the hand.

Their feet are rooted in earth but their hearts are moody,

Close to the dark skies, wind never still in their ears—

They were the battlefield of Europe for five hundred years.

The thunder may be guns. The skirts of the wind are bloody.

This land, this low land under threatening skies,

This Flanders full of skulls, has set a fury in the slow

Hearts of its people that, taking centuries to grow,

Now burns with a certain violence in their eyes.

It has made their land a passion which they must save

In every generation, spilling their blood to hold it.

Dogged and avaricious, they have never sold it.

Proud and fierce it has kept them. It has kept them brave.

Given their language coarseness, and a great breath

Of soldiers’ laughter from the belly and a flood

Of poetry that flows like war in the stream of their blood,

Slow and melancholy and half in love with death.

This was my father’s country and the country of my birth,

And isn’t it a strange thing that after the deliberate mind

Has yielded itself wholly to another land, stubborn and blind,

The heart gives its secret homage still to Flemish earth?

I knew it when I was seven, after the war and years of slumber,

The Flemish self awoke as we entered the Scheldt, and suddenly,

The tears rushed to my eyes though all we could see

Was a low land under a huge sky that I did not remember.

THE SACRED ORDER

For George Sarton

Never forget this when the talk is clever:

Michelet suffered chaos in his bone

To bring to clarity the history of France.

His life-blood flowed into old documents.

The scholar at his desk burned like a lover.

At century’s end behold the sceptic rules;

Doubt, like the tyrant’s servants, seals

The visionary books. The scholar’s passion,

His burning heart is wholly out of fashion.

The human spirit goes, the caste prevails.

Urbane and foxy, the professors shut

Up Michelet in his coffin and abandon

To entomologists the wild and living truth

To pin down in their books like any moth.

The mandarins come in, the men go out.