Collected Poems 1931-74 (17 page)

Chemists might compare their properties:

The Englishman with his Apologising Bag,

The Ainu with interesting stone-age cuffs,

Or whoever invented stars as a witness:

Nations which through excess of sensibility

Repose in opium under a great leaf:

The French with their elastic manual code:

And so comparing, find the three common desires,

Of hunger, smiling, and of being loved.

Outside, I mean, the penumbra of the real

Mystery, the whole world as a Why.

Living purely in the naked How, so join

As the writer unites dissimilars

Or the doctor with his womb-bag joins

The cumbersome ends of broken bones in

A simple perishable function,

To exhale like a smoke ring the O: Joy.

1948/
1948

Writing this stuff should not have been like

Suicide over some ordinary misapprehension:

A man going into his own house, say,

Turning out all the lights before undressing,

At the bedside of some lovely ignoramus

Whispering: ‘Tomorrow I swear is the last time.'

Or: ‘Believe, and I swear you will never die.'

This nib dragged out like the late train

Racing on iron bars for the north.

Target: another world, not necessarily better,

Of course, but different, completely different.

The hour-glass shifting its trash of seconds.

If it does not end this way perhaps some other.

Gossip lying in a furnished room, blinds drawn.

A poem with its throat cut from ear to ear.

1948/
1948

Proffer the loaves of pain

Forward and back again,

By time's inflexible quantum

They shall not meet this autumn.

Stone islets, stars in stations,

Crab up their false equations,

Whether they run or saunter

They shall not meet this winter.

Boredom of breathless swan

Whiteness they gazed upon,

At skylight a roamer.

They shall not meet in summer.

Fast on these capes of green

Silence falls in between

Finger and wedding-ring.

They shall not meet in spring.

1948/
1948

Look, on that hill we met

On this shoreline parted.

The experts sailed off northwards

With their spears, with the connivance

Of oracles to back them. I remained.

Tears weigh little upon the hands,

Tears weigh less in the eye than seeds

Shaken from the feverish totals

Blossoming on time's pronouncing tree.

The seasons file their summaries

Overheard by the echoes in the wells,

Overlooked by the mirrors shod in horn,

Copied by spies, interpreters or witnesses.

The augurs in the delta have not
once

Foreseen this dust upon an ageing eyeball,

Vitreous as sea-spun glass, this black

Sperm of winter sea we walk beside,

The marble onanism of these nymphs.

1948/
1948

Fraudulent perhaps in that they gave

No sense of muscle but a swollen languor

Though moved by webs: yet idly, idly

As soap-bubbles drift from a clay-pipe

They mowed the lake in tapestry,

Passing in regal exhaustion by us,

King, queen and cygnets, one by one.

Did one dare to remember other swans

In anecdotes of Gauguin or of Rabelais?

Some became bolsters for the Greeks,

Some rubber Lohengrins provided comedy.

The flapping of the wings excited Leda.

The procession is over and what is now

Alarming is more the mirror split

From end to end by the harsh clap

Of the wooden beaks, than the empty space

Which follows them about,

Stained by their whiteness when they pass.

We sit like drunkards and inhale the swans.

1948/
1948

The colonial, the expatriate walking here

Awkwardly enclosing the commonwealth of his love

Stoops to this lovely expurgated prose-land

Where winter with its holly locks the schools

And spring with nature improvises

With the thrush on ploughland, with the scarecrow.

Moss walls, woollen forests, Shakespear, desuetude:

Roots of his language as familiar as salt

Inhaling cattle lick in this mnemonic valley

Where the gnats assort, the thrush familiarises,

And over his cottage a colloquial moon.

1948/
1948

On seeming to presume

Where earth and water plan

No place for him, no home

Outside the confining womb,

Mistake him if you can.

The rubber forceps do their job

And here at least stands man.

Refined by no technique

Beyond the great ‘I will',

They pour the poison in,

Confuse the middle ear

Of his tormented dust,

Before the brute can speak

‘I will' becomes ‘I must'.

Excluded from the true

Participating love

His conscience takes its due

From this excluding sense

His condemnation brought.

From past to future tense

He mutters on ‘I ought'.

He
mutters
on
‘I
ought
'
.

Yet daring to presume

He follows to the stews

His sense of loathsomeness,

Frustration, daily news.

A scholarship in hate

Endows him limb by limb.

‘My mother pushed me from behind,

And so I learned to swim.'

The bunsen's head of hair,

All fancy free and passion,

Till iron circumstance

Confirms him in his lies,

To walk the Hamlet fashion.

He wrings his hands and cries

‘I want to live', but dies.

He
wants
to
live
but
dies.

Return, return and find

Beneath what bed or table

The lovers first in mind

Composed this poor unstable

Derivative of clay,

By passion or by play,

That bears the human label.

What king or saint could guide

This caliban of gloom

So swaddled in despair

To breathe the factory's air,

Or locked in furnished room

Weep out his threescore there

For daring to presume,

For
daring
to
presume?

1948/
1948

Darkness, divulge my share in light

As man in name though not in nature.

Lay down truth's black hermetic wings

For less substantial things

To call my weight my own

By love's nomenclature:

Matriculate by harmlessness

From this tuistic zone,

Possessing what I almost own.

And where each heap of music falls

Burns like a star below the sea

To light the ocean's cracked saloons

And mirror its plurality

Through nature's tideless nights and noons

Teach me the mastery of the curse,

The bending circumstance to free,

And mix my better with my worse.

1960/
1948

Early one morning unremarked

She walked abroad to see

Black bitumen and roses

Upon the island shelf

To hear those inexperienced

Thrushes repeat their clauses

From some corruptible tree

All copied in herself.

When from the Grecian meadows

Responsive rose the larks,

Stiffly as if on strings,

Ebbing, drew thin as tops

While each in rising squeezed

His spire of singing drops

On that renewed landscape

Like semen from the grape.

1948/
1948

One she floats as Venice might,

Bloated among her ambiguities:

What hebetude or carelessness shored up

Goths were not smart enough to capture.

The city, yes: the water: not the style.

Her dispossession now may seem to us

Idle and ridiculous, quivering

In the swollen woodwork of these

Floating carcases of the doges,

Dissolving into spires and cages of water:

Venice blown up, and turning green.

Another wears out humbly like a craft:

Red wells where the potter's thumb

Sealed his jars of guaranteed oil.

That fluent thumb which presses

On history's vibrating string,

Pressing here, there, in a wounded place.

Some have left names only: Carthage:

Where the traveller may squeeze out

A few drops of ink or salt,

On deserted promontories may think:

‘No wonder. A river once turned over

In its sleep and all the cities fled.'

Now in Greece which is not yet Greece

The adversary was also strong.

Yet here the serfs have built their discontents

As spiders do their junctions, here,

This orchard, painted tables set outside

A whitewashed house,

And on a rusty nail the violin

Is hanging by one wrist, still ownerless:

Disowned by the devastator and as yet

Uncherished by its tenants in the old

Human smells of excrement and cooking:

Waiting till the spades press through to us,

To be discovered, standing in our lives,

Rhodes, death-mask of a Greek town.

1948/
1948

At Funchal the blackish yeast

Of the winter sea I hated rubbed

And gobbled on a thousand capes,

That crumble with the traveller's confidence

In being alone, some who still tread

Decks as if they were green lawns;

But the water coiled backwards

Like a spring to press its tides

Idle and uniform as grapes in presses

Descrying a horizontal mood,

The weather slowing like a pedal,

Smelling of sick and spices,

Red leather and the spermy polish

Men in boots rub boldly on to brass.

But night is always night even here,

Beyond the introspective glare

Of the green islands on the awnings,

St. Vincent copied in the pupils,

Marrow of romance and old sea-fevers,

Seen from a sanded rail above the sharks

On this half-deck polished like a nape.

1955/
1948

The grass they cropped converting into speed

Made green the concert of their hooves

Over the long serene sierras turning

In the axle of the sun's eye

To legs as delicate as spiders', picking out

Pathways for shadows mounted on them:

Enigma, Fosforos, and Indigo, which rumbled

Through the pursuing quarries like a wind

To where the paths fall, and we all of us

Go down with the sun, sierra by sierra, held

A moment rising in the stirrups, then abandoned

To where the black valleys from their shoes

Subtract sparks upon flints, and the long

Quivering swish of tails on flesh

Try to say ‘sleep', try to say ‘food' and ‘home'.

1960/
1948

At insular café tables under awnings

Bemused benighted half-castes pause

To stretch upon a table yawning

Ten yellow claws and

Order green coconuts to drink with straws.

Milk of the green loaf-coconuts

Which soon before them amputated stand,

Broken, you think, from some great tree of breasts,

Or the green skulls of savages trepanned.

Lips that are curved to taste this albumen,

To dredge with some blue spoon among the curds

Which drying on tongue or on moustache are tasteless

As droppings of bats or birds.

Re-enacting here a theory out of Darwin

They cup their yellow mandibles to shape

Their nuts, tilt them in drinking poses,

To drain them slowly from the very nape:

Green coconuts, green

Coconuts, patrimony of the ape.

1948/
1948