Collected Poems 1931-74 (13 page)

Gum, oats and syrup

The Arabians bore.

Evoking nothing from the sea but more

And more employ to christen them

With whips of salt and glittering spray,

Their wooden homes rocked on the chastening salt.

Lamps on altars, breath of children;

So coming and going with their talk of bales,

Lading and enterprises marked out

And fell on this rusty harbour

Where tills grew fat with cash

And the quills of Jews invented credit,

And in margins folded up

Bales, gum-arabic, and syrup;

Syrian barley in biffed coracles

Hugging the burking gulf or blown

As cargoes from the viny breath

Of mariners, the English or the Dutch.

In manners taught them nothing much

Beyond the endurance in the vile.

Left in history words like

Portuguese or Greek

Whose bastards can still speak and smile.

After this, lamps

Confused the foreigners;

Boys, women and drugs

Built this ant-hill for grammarians

Who fed upon the fathers fat with cash,

Turned oats and syrup here

To ribbons and wands and rash

Patents for sex and feathers,

Sweets for festivals and deaths.

Nothing changes. The indifferent

Or the merely good died off, but fixed

Here once the human type ‘Levant'.

Something fine of tooth and with the soft

Hanging lashes to the eye,

Given once by Spain and kept

In a mad friendship here and sadness

By the promiscuous sea upon this spit of sand.

Something money or promises can buy.

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1946

The evil and the good seem undistinguished,

Indeed all half asleep; their coming was

No eloquent proposition of natures

Too dense for material ends, quartered in pain.

But a propitiation by dreams of belief

A relief from the chafing ropes of thought.

Piled high in Byzance like a treasure-ship

The church heels over, sinking in sound

And yellow lamplight while the arks and trolleys

And blazing crockery of the orthodox God

Make it a fearful pomp for peasants,

A sorcery to the black-coated rational,

To the town-girl an adventure, an adventure.

Now however all hums and softly spins

Like a great top, the many-headed black

Majority merged in a single sea-shell.

Idle thoughts press in, amazing one—

How the theologians with beards of fire

Divided us upon the boiling grid of thought,

Or with dividers spun for us a fine

Conniving cobweb—traps for the soul.

Three sailors stand like brooms.

The altar has opened like a honeycomb;

An erect and flashing deacon like a despot howls.

Surely we might ourselves exhale

Our faults like rainbows on this incense?

If souls did fire the old Greek barber

Who cut my hair this morning would go flying,

Not stand, a hopeless, window-bound and awkward

Child at this sill of pomp,

Moved by a hunger money could not sate,

Smelling the miracle and softly sighing.

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1946

Mothers and sculptors work

By small rehearsed caresses in the block

Each to redeeming ends,

By shame or kisses print

Good citizens, good lovers and good friends.

Your impatient hero so admired

In all his epic scenery

Was such a vessel once, unfired,

A chaos on the wheel and rocked

In a muse on the womb's dark Galilee.

And the lovers, those two characters,

Who have their exits and their entrances,

A certain native style may give

As predetermined in the bone,

Speak through the crude gags of the grave.

Their luck and hazard rests, my dear,

So lightly on us in our dreams

As voices rich with tears,

Whom no poetic justice gave

A friendship mad as ours.

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1946

If seen by many minds at once your image

As in a prism falling breaks itself,

Or looking upwards from a gleaming spoon

Defies: a smile squeezed up and vanishing

In roundels of diversion like the moon.

Yet here you are confirmed by the smallest

Wish or kiss upon the rising darkness

But rootless as a wick afloat in water,

Fatherless as shoes walking over dead leaves;

A patient whom no envy stirs but joy

And what the harsh chords of your experience leave—

This dark soft eye, so liquid now and hoarse

With pleasure: or your arms in mirrors

Combing out softly hair

As lovely as a planet's and remote.

How many several small forevers

Whispered in the rind of the ear

Melissa, by this Mediterranean sea-edge,

Captured and told?

How many additions to the total silence?

Surely we increased you by very little,

But as with a net or gun to make your victims men?

Cut from the joints of this immense

Darkness upon the face of Egypt lying,

We move in the possession of our acts

Alone, the dread apostles of our weakness.

For look. The mauve street is swallowed

And the bats have begun to stitch slowly.

At the stable-door the carpenter's three sons

Bend over a bucket of burning shavings,

Warming their inwardness and quite unearthly

As the candle-marking time begins.

Three little magi under vast Capella,

Beloved of all as shy as the astronomer,

She troubles heaven with her golden tears,

Tears flowing down upon us at this window,

The children rapt, the mauve street swallowed,

The harps of flame among the shadows

In Egypt now and far from Nazareth.

Some, the great Adepts, found it

A lesser part of them—ashes and thorns—

Where this sea-sickness on a bed

Proved nothing calm and virginal,

But animal, unstable, heavy as lead.

Some wearied for a sex

Like a science of known relations:

A God proved through the flesh—or else a mother.

They dipped in this huge pond and found it

An ocean of shipwrecked mariners instead,

Cried out and foundered, losing one another.

But some sailed into this haven

Laughing, and completely undecided,

Expecting nothing more

Than the mad friendship of bodies,

And farewells undisguised by pride: 

They
wrote those poems—the diminutives of madness

While at a window someone stood and cried.

At this the last yet second meeting,

Almost the autumn was postponed for us—

Season when the fermenting lovers lie

Among the gathered bunches quietly.

So formal was it, so incurious:

The chime of glasses, the explorer,

The soldier and the secret agent

With a smile inviting like a target.

Six of a summer evening, you remember.

The painful rehearsal of the smile

And the words: ‘I am going into a decline,

Promised by summer but by winter disappointed.'

The face was turned as sadly as a hare's,

Provoked by prudence and discretion to repeat:

‘Some of them die, you know, or go away.

Our denials are only gestures—can we help it?'

Turn to another aspect of the thing.

The cool muslin dress shaken with flowers—

It was not the thought that was unworthy

Knowing all you knew, it was the feeling.

Idly turning from the offered tea I saw

As swimmers see their past, in the lamplight

Burning, particular, fastidious and lost

Your figure forever in the same place,

Same town and country, sorting letters

On a green table from many foreign cities,

The long hare's features, the remarkable sad face.

Waterbirds sailing upon the darkness

Of Mareotis, this was the beginning:

Dry reeds touched by the shallow beaks he heard

On the sand trash of an estuary near Libya,

This dense yellow lake, ringing now

With the insupportable accents of the Word.

Common among the commoners of promise

He illustrated to the ordinary those

Who found no meaning in the flesh's weakness—

The elegant psychotics on their couches

In Alexandria, hardly tempted him,

With talk of business, war and lovely clothes.

The lemon-skinned, the gold, the half-aware

Were counters for equations he examined,

Grave as their statues fashioned from the life;

A pioneer in pleasure on the long

Linen-shaded colonnades he often heard

Girls' lips puff in the nostrils of the fife.

Now dense as clouded urine moved the lake

Whose waters were to be his ark and fort

By the harsh creed of water-fowl and snake,

To the wave-polished stone he laid his ear

And said: ‘I dare not ask for what I hope,

And yet I may not speak of what I fear.'

Now the sun again, like a bloody convict,

Comes up on us, the wheels of everything

Hack and catch the luckless rising;

The newly married, the despairing,

The pious ant and groom,

Open like roses in the darkened bed-room.

The bonds are out and the debentures

Shape the coming day's adventures,

The revising of money by strategy or tears—

And here we lie like riders on a cloud

Whom kisses only can inform

In breath exhaling twenty thousand years

Of curses on the sun—but not too loud.

While the days of judgement keep,

Lucky ladies sleek with sleep,

Lucky ladies sleek with sleep.

Left like an unknown's breath on mirrors,

The enchanters, the persuaders

Whom the seasons swallow up,

Only leave us ash in saucers,

Or to mice the last invaders

Open cupboard-doors or else

Lipstick-marks upon a cup.

Fingerprint the crook of time,

Ask him what he means by it,

Eyes and thoughts and lovely bodies,

David's singing, Daphne's wit

Like Eve's apple undigested

Rot within us bit by bit.

Experience in a humour ends,

Wrapped in its own dark metaphor,

And divining winter breaks:

Now one by one the Hungers creep

Up from the orchards of the mind

Here to trouble and confuse

Old men's after-dinner sleep.

All summer watch the children in the public garden,

The tribe of children wishing you were like them—

These gruesome little artists of the impulse

For whom the perfect anarchy sustains

A brilliant apprehension of the present,

In games of joy, of love or even murder

On this green springing grass will empty soon

A duller opiate, Loving, to the drains.

Cast down like asterisks among their toys,

Divided by the lines of daylight only

From adventure, crawl among the rocking-horses,

And the totems, dolls and animals and rings

To the tame suffix of a nursery sleep

Where all but few of them

The restless inventories of feeling keep.

Sleep has no walls. Sleep admits

The great Imago with its terror, yet they lie

Like something baking, candid cheek on finger,

With folded lip and eye

Each at the centre of the cobweb seeking

His boy or girl, begotten and confined

In terror like the edges of a table

Begot by passion and confirmed in error.

What can they tell the watcher at the window,

Writing letters, smoking up there alone,

Trapped in the same limitation of his growth

And yet not envying them their childhood

Since he endured his own?

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1946