Collected Poems 1931-74 (18 page)

Further from him whose head of woman's hair

Grew down his slender back

Or whose soft palms were puckered where

The nails were driven in,

Rising, denounced the dust they were,

Became white lofts of witness to the sin.

Both here and on that partworn map

The legionary darned for Rome,

Further from Europe even, in Brazil

Warmed by the jungle's sap,

Finding no home from home became

Dark consul for the countries of the Will.

Here named, there honoured, nowhere understood,

Riding over Rio on his cliffs of stone

Whose small original was wood,

In gradual petrifaction of his pain,

He spreads the conscript's slow barbaric stain

Over the cities of the flesh, his widowhood.

1948/
1948

Garcia, when you drew off those two

White bullfighting gloves your hairy

Fingers spread themselves apart,

And then contracted to a hand again,

Attached to an arm, leading to a heart,

And I suddenly saw the cottage scene

Where the knocking on the door is repeated

Nobody answers it: but inside the room

The fox has its head under the madman's shirt.

The homing pain for such as are attached:

Odours that hit and rebuff in some garden

Behind the consul's house, the shutters drawn:

In the dark street brushed by a woman's laugh.

Ursa Major to the sailor could spell wounds,

More than the mauling of the northern bear,

At the hub of the green wheel, standing on the sea.

Home for most is what you can least bear.

Ego
gigno
lumen,
I beget light

But darkness is also of my nature.

(For such as sail out beyond

The proper limits of their own freewill.)

Anonymous hand, record one afternoon,

In May, some time before the fig-leaf:

Boats lying idle in the sky, a town

Thrown as on a screen of watered silk,

Lying on its side, reddish and soluble,

A sheet of glass leading down into the sea …

Down here an idle boy catches a cicada:

Imprisons it, laughing, in his sister's cloak

In whose warm folds the silly creature sings.

Shape of boats, body of a young girl, cicada,

Conspire and join each other here,

In twelve sad lines against the dark.

If space curves how much the more thought,

Returning after every conjugation

To the young point of rest it started in?

The fulness of being is not in refinement,

By the delimitation of the object, but

In roundness, the embosoming of the Real.

The egg, the cone, the rhombus: orders of reality

Which declaim coldly against the reason:

We may surround and view from every side,

We may expound, break into fields of thought,

But qualifying in this manner only spoil:

On this derogatory wheel stands Man.

Now who is greater than his greatest appetite?

Who is weaker than the least of his fears?

Who claims that he can match them perfectly,

Apprehended without to unapprehended within?

We Greeks were taught how to exhaust ideas,

Melissa, but first begin with people. There we score!

No Roman understood our sunny concupiscence,

The fast republican colour of our values.

Philosophy with us was not worked out.

We used experience up. The rest precipitated.

Soon we were still alive: but nothing else was left.

At last with four peroxide whores

Like doped marigolds growing upon this balcony,

We wait for sunrise, all conscripted

From our passions by the tedium and spleen,

While the rich dews are forming

On the mind of space already thick enough

To cut with scythes on the wet marbles

Of Acropolis, intentions murdered by the cold.

I take her in my arms, a cobweb full of diamonds,

Which by some culture might be tears or pearls….

One speaks Turkish, slender as an ilex,

Half asleep is boiling an egg;

A Jewess, lovely, conspiratorial,

Over a spirit-lamp by an hour-glass

Too small to have been made for timing

Anything much longer than a kiss.

Wind among prisms all tonight again:

Alone again, awake again in the Sufi's house,

Cumbered by this unexpiring love,

Jammed like a cartridge in the breech

Leaving the bed with its dented pillow,

The married shoes alert upon the floor.

Is life more than the sum of its errors?

Tubs of clear flesh, egyptian women:

Favours, kohl, nigger's taste of seeds,

Pepper or lemon, breaking from one's teeth

Bifurcated as the groaning stalks of celery.

Much later comes the tapping on the panel.

The raven in the grounds:

At four thirty the smell of satin, leather:

Rain falling in the mirror above the mad

Jumbled pots of expensive scent and fard,

And the sense of some great impending scandal.

Sometime we shall all come together

And it will be time to put a stop

To this little rubbing together of minimal words,

To let the Word Prime repose in its mode

As yolk in its fort of albumen reposes,

Contented by the circular propriety

Of its hammock in the formal breathing egg.

Much as in sculpture the idea

Must not of its own anecdotal grossness

Sink through the armature of the material,

The model of its earthly clothing:

But be a plumbline to its weight in space …

The whole resting upon the ideogram

As on a knifeblade, never really cutting,

Yet always sharp, like this very metaphor

For perpetual and
useless
suffering exposed

By conscience in the very act of writing.

Quiet room, four candles, red wine in pottery:

Our conversation burning like a fuse,

In this cone of light like some emulsion:

Aristarchus of Samos was only half a man

Believing he could make it all coherent

Without the muddled limits of a woman's arm,

Darning a ladder, warming the begging-bowl.

Quiet force of candles burning in pools of oak,

Conducted by the annals of the word

Towards poor Aristarchus. If he was only half

A man, Melissa, then I am the other half,

Not in believing with him but by failing to.

‘Art adorns.' Thus Galbo.

Proconsuls should be taught to leave art alone.

Before we came the men of the east

Knew it contained a capital metaphysic,

As chess once founded in astronomy

Degenerated into the game we know.

For the Western man of this Egopetal Age

Cant, rules, pains and prohibitions,

Each with its violent repulsive force.

Only in this still round, touching hands,

To live and lapse and die created,

As Socrates died penniless to leave a fortune.

When they brought on the sleeping child

Bandaged on its glittering trolley

One could think no more of anecdotes:

Ugly Sappho lying under an acorn wishing,

Cyrano discountenanced by a nose like a wen,

My father's shadow telling me three times

Not to play with the scissors: None of this,

But of something inanimate about to be cut up:

A loaf with the oven scent on it exhaling

A breath of sacrifice, clouding the knife.

Instead of this or that fictitious woman

Marry a cloud and carve it in a likeness.

Incision of a comb in hair: lips stained

Blue as glass windows with the grapes

We picked and tasted by ourselves in Greece.

Such was the yesterday that made us

Appropriates of a place, club-members

Of an oleander-grove asleep in chairs.

In youth the decimal days for spending:

Now in age they fall in heaps about me

Thick in concussion as the apples

Bouncing on drums to multiply the seasons

On the floors of scented granaries,

In memory, old barn, wrapped up in straw.

Literarum
oblivio
… Now the Romans

Are going to get the chance they ask for,

That hated jurist's tongue …

Their violence will be greater than ours.

Happily we shall not live to see it,

Melissa, nurse, augur, special self.

Once the statues lined the whole main-street

Like nightmares, returning from her house,

Night after night by rosy link-light,

A rose between my teeth, by any other name.

Now we sit in linen deck-chairs here

Looking out to sea and eating olives

From a painted jar: Flavia did this for me,

Won me these favours, this exile from myself.

The exile I had already begun, within myself

She translated like a linguist: Paris.

The King was a bore: it was not my fault he was:

I loved her because I did not know myself.

I knew her yet in the shadow cast by myself

My love was hidden. How we deceive ourselves!

Only our friends know if our wives are faithful,

They will never tell us. (Marc smiling.)

Anyway, now, this animal concupiscence

Of old age in a treaty port: still only consul.

The meteors and the wild mares

Are growing manes, my dear. Autumn is on the way.

We crouch in the wrecked shooting-galleries of progress.

And where you turn, black head of grapes, the sea

Is bluer than forget-me-nots are blue,

Where the linguist in you paraphrases sadly:

The heart must be very old to feel so young.

After twenty years another meeting,

Those faces round, as circumspect as eggshells:

But in the candle-light fard

Depicts its own origins and ends:

Flesh murky as old horn,

Hands dry now as sea-biscuit,

Sipping the terrible beat of Time

We talk about the past as if it were not

Dead, that April when the ships pouted

From breathless harbours north of Tenedos,

And the green blood of the Delphic bushes

Put back their ears

Where the Greek wind ran, insisted, and became.

Then of poor Clea: her soul sickened in her face

Like flowers in some shadowy sick-room,

How to recall that wingless sickle of a nose,

Thinned out and famished into fever:

The liquid drops of eyes, darkened by carbon,

Brusque ways, an imperative style and voice—

Always catching her dress in doors …

Can we afford to consider ourselves more fortunate?

Lips I would have died to hear speak

Now held in complete sesame here

By a fire of blue sea-coal,

In Beirut, winter coming on.

From the intellect's grosser denominations

I can sort one or two, how indistinctly,

Living on as if in some unripened faculty

Quite willing to release them, let them die.

Putative mothers-in-ideas like that Electra's

Tallow orphan skin in a bed smelling faintly

Of camphor, the world, the harsh laugh of Glauca:

But both like geometrical figures now,

Then musky, carmine … (I am hunting for

The precise shade of pink for Acte's mouth:

Pink as the sex of a mastiff …)

Now as the great paunch of this earth

Allows its punctuation by seeds, some to be

Trees, some men walking as trees, so the mind

Offers its cakes of spore to time in them:

The sumptuary pleasure-givers living on

In qualities as sure as taste of hair and mouth,

White partings of the hair like highways,

Permutations of a rose, buried beneath us now,

Under the skin of thinking like a gland

Discharging its obligations in something trivial:

Say a kiss, a handclasp: say a stone tear.

They went. We did not hear them leave.

They came. We were not ready for them.

Then turning the sphere to death

Which like some great banking corporation

Threatens, forecloses, and from all

Our poses selects the one sea-change—

Naturally one must smile to see him powerless

Not in the face of these small fictions

But in the greater one they nourished

By exhaustion of the surfaces of life,

Leaving the True Way, so that suddenly

We no longer haunted the streets

Of our native city, guilty as a popular singer,

Clad in the fur of some wild animal.

And so at last goodbye,

For time does not heed its own expenditure,

As the heart does in making old,

Infecting memory with a sigh-by-sigh,

Or the intolerable suppurating hope and wish.

It has no copy, moves in its own

Blind illumination seriously,

Traced somewhere perhaps by a yellow philosopher

Motionless over a swanpan,

Who found the door open—it always is:

Who found the fire banked: it never goes out.