Collected Poems 1931-74 (22 page)

Something like the sea,

Unlaboured momentum of water

But going somewhere,

Building and subsiding,

The busy one, the loveless.

Or the wind that slits

Forests from end to end,

Inspiriting vast audiences,

Ovations of leafy hands

Accepting, accepting.

But neither is yet

Fine enough for the line I hunt.

The dry bony blade of the

Sword-grass might suit me

Better: an assassin of polish.

Such a bite of perfect temper

As unwary fingers provoke,

Not to be felt till later,

Turning away, to notice the thread

Of blood from its unfelt stroke.

1955/
1955

Indifferent history! In such a place

Can we choose what really matters most?

Three hundred oars munched up the gulf.

A tyrant fell. The wise men turned their beds

To face the East—this was war. Or else

Eating and excreting raised to the rank of arts:

Sporting the broad purple—this was peace,

For demagogues exhausted by sensations.

From covens of delight they brought

The silver lampreys served on deathless chargers

By cooks of polity and matchless tact.

Only their poets differed in being free

From the historic consciousness and its

Defeats: wise servants of the magnet and

The sieve, against this human backdrop told

The truth in oracles and never asked themselves

In what or why they never could believe.

1955/
1955

I recall her by a freckle of gold

In the pupil of one eye, an odd

Strawberry-gold: and after many years

Of forgetting that musical body—

Arms too long, wrists too slender—

Remember only the unstable wishes

Disquieting the flesh. I will not

Deny her pomp was laughable, urban:

Behind it one could hear the sad

Provincial laughter rotted by insomnia.

None of these meetings are planned,

I guess, or willed by the exemplars

Of a city's love—a city founded in

The name of love: to me is always

Brown face, white teeth, cheap summer frock

In green and white stripes and then

Forever a strawberry eye. I recalled no more

For years. The eye was lying in wait.

Then in another city from the same

Twice-used air and sheets, in the midst

Of a parting: the same dark bedroom,

Arctic chamber-pot and cruel iron bed,

I saw the street-lamp unpick Theodora

Like an old sweater, unwrinkle eyes and mouth,

Unbandaging her youth to let me see

The wounds I had not understood before.

How could I have ignored such wounds?

The bloody sweepings of a loving smile

Strewed like Osiris among the dunes?

Now only my experience recognizes her

Too late, among the other great survivors

Of the city's rage, and places her among

The champions of love—among the true elect!

1955/
1955

‘No one will ever pick them, I think,

The ugly off-white clusters: all the grace

Lies in the name of death named.

Are they a true certificate for death?'

    ‘I wonder'

‘You might say that once the sages,

Death being identified, forgave it language:

Called it “asphodel”, as who should say

The synonym for scentless, colourless,

    Solitary,

Rock-loving …' ‘Memory is all of these.'

‘Yes, they asserted the discipline of memory,

Which admits of no relapse in its

Consignment, does not keep forever.'

    ‘Nor does death.'

‘You mean our dying?' ‘No, but when one is

Alone, neither happy nor unhappy, in

The deepest ache of reason where this love

Becomes a malefactor, clinging so,

    You surely know—'

‘Death's stock will stand no panic,

Be beautiful in jars or on a coffin,

Exonerate the flesh when it has turned

Or mock the enigma with an epitaph

    It never earned.'

‘These quite precisely guard ironic truth,

And you may work your way through every

Modulation of the rose, to fill your jars

With pretty writing-stuff: but for death—'

    ‘Truly, always give us

These comfortless, convincing, even, yes,

A little mocking, Grecian asphodels.'

1955/
1955

O Freedom which to every man entire

Presents imagined longings to his fire,

To swans the water, bees the honey-cell,

To bats the dark, to lovers loving well,

Only to the wise may you

Restricting and confining be,

All who half-delivered from themselves

Suffer your conspiracy,

Freedom, Freedom, prison of the free.

1956/
1956

Her sea limps up here twice a day

And sigh by leaden sigh deposes

Crude granite hefts and sponges

Sucked smooth as foreheads or as noses;

No footprints dove the labouring sand,

For terrene clays bake smooth

But coarse as a gipsy's hand.

A rose in an abandoned well,

The sexless babble of a spring,

A carob's torn and rosy flesh,

A vulture sprawling on a cliff

Will tell the traveller nothing.

The double axe, the double sex,

The noble mystery of the doves,

Before men sorted out their loves

By race and gender chose

One from these dying groves.

This much the sea limps in to touch

With old confining foam-born hand

While lovers seeking nothing much

Or hunting the many through the one

May taste in its reproachful roar

The ancient relish of her sun.

1966/
1956

Veronese grey! Here in the Octagon Room

Our light ruffles and decodes

Greys of cigar-ash or river clay

Into the textual plumage of a mind—

Paulo, all his Muses held

Quietly in emulsion up against

A pane of cockney sky.

It is not only the authority

Of godly sensual forms which pity

And overwhelm us—this grey copied

From eyes I no more see,

Recording every shade of pain, yes,

All it takes to give smiles

The deathly candour of a dying art,

Or worth to words exchanged in darkness:

Is it only the dead who have such eyes?

No, really,

I think it is the feudal calm

Of sensuality enjoyed without aversion

Or regret … (incident of the ring

Lost in the grass: her laughter).

I should have been happy

In these rainy streets, a captive still

Like all these glittering hostages

We carried out of Italy, canvases

Riding the cracking winds in great London

Parks: happy or unhappy, who can tell you?

Only Veronese grey walks backwards

In the past across my mind

To where tugs still howl and mumble

On the father river,

And the grey feet passing, quiver

On pavements greyer than his greys …

Less wounding perhaps because the belongers

Loved here, died here, and took their art

Like love, with a pinch of salt, yes

Their pain clutched in the speechless

Deathless calm of Method. Gods!

1960/
1956

First come the Infantry in scented bodices,

Deployed, and after them the Birdwomen,

(The Ladies Air Arm) clad in shirts of male,

And riding gravid chargers shod with spurs.

In shrill capitulation like some endless wife.

After them in rumbling families

Symbolic engines only found in Jung,

Bombs polished on the lathe like eggs,

Grey mammary tanks, forceps and hooks with eyes,

Unbuttoned panzers, huge uncircumcised artillery,

Grave in procession rustle past the stand.

‘One age, one land, one leader and one sex.'

1980/
1957

Here is a man who says: Let there be light.

Let who is dressed in hair walk upright,

The house give black smoke, the children

Be silenced by fire and apples. Let

A sedative evening bring steaming cattle

The domestic kettle, contagion of sleep,

Deeper purer surer even than Eden.

Twin tides speak making of two three

By fission by fusion, a logarithmic sea.

What was bitter in the apple is eaten deep,

Rust sleeps in the steel, canker will keep.

Let one plus one quicken and be two,

Keep silence that silence keep you.

1960/
1960

Night falls. The dark expresses

Roll back their iron scissors to commence

Precision of the wheels' elision

From whose dark serial jabber sparks

Swing swaying through the mournful capitals

And in these lighted cages sleep

With open eyes the passengers

Each committed to his private folly,

On hinges of wanhope the long

Sleeping shelves of men and women,

A library of maggots dreaming, rolls.

Some retiring to their sleeping past,

On clicking pillows feel the flickering peep

Of lighted memories, keys slipped in grooves

Parted like lips receiving or resisting kisses.

Pillars of smoke expend futurity.

This is how it is for me, for you

It must be different lying awake to hear

At a garden's end the terrible club-foot

Crashing among iron spars, the female shrieks,

Love-song of steel and the consenting night.

To feel the mocking janitor, sleep,

Shake now and wake to lean there

On a soft elbow seeing where we race

A whiplash curving outwards to the stars,

A glowing coal to light the lamps of space.

1960/
1960

Miss Willow, secretly known as ‘tit' …

Plotkin who slipped on new ice

And wounded the stinks master

The winter when the ponds froze over …

Square roots of the symbol Abraham

Cut off below the burning bush,

Or in the botany classes heads

Drying between covers like rare ferns,

Stamen and pistil, we were young then.

Later with tunes like ‘Hips and Whores'

The song-book summed us up,

Mixing reality with circumstance,

With Hotchkiss cock of the walk

Top button undone, and braided cap,

He was the way and the life.

What dismays is not time

Assuaging every thirst with a surprise,

Bitterness hidden in desiring bodies,

Unfolded strictly, governed by the germ.

Plotkin cooked like a pie in iron lungs:

Glass rods the doctors dipped in burning nitrates

Dripped scalding on in private hospitals

And poor ‘tit' Willow who had been

Young, pretty and perhaps contemptuous

Dreaming of love, was carried to Spain in a cage.

1960/
1960

I like to see so much the old man's loves,

Egregious if you like and often shabby

Protruding from the ass's skin of verse,

For better or for worse,

The bones of poems cultured by a thirst—

Dilapidated taverns, dark eyes washed

Now in the wry and loving brilliance

Of such barbaric memories

As held them when the dyes of passion ran.

No cant about the sottishness of man!

The forest of dark eyes he mused upon,

Out of ikons, waking beside his own

In stuffy brothels, on stained mattresses,

Watched by the melting vision of the flesh;

Eros the tutor of our callowness

Deployed like ants across his ageing flesh

The crises of great art, the riders

Of love, their bloody lariats whistling,

The cries locked in the quickened breath,

The love-feast of a sort of love-in-death.

And here I find him great. Never

To attempt a masterpiece of size—

You must leave life for that. No

But always to preserve the adventive

Minute, never to destroy the truth,

Admit the coarse manipulations of the lie.

If only the brown fingers franking his love

Could once be fixed in art, the immortal

Episode be recorded—
there
he would awake

On a fine day to shed his acts like scabs,

The trespasses on life and living slake

In the taste, not of his death but of his dying:

And like the rest of us he died still trying.

1964/
1960