Collected Poems 1931-74 (25 page)

A treatise of the subtle Body,

Dark van of winter-pledging stars,

Spearheads of the advancing deep

In waters whose commotions keep

The tracery of ships' lace spars.

Another island: another small eternity,

Many tonight must smell the thunder

Look up uneasily from yellowing books:

Is the work of art really a work of nature,

To mobilise the sense of wonder,

Revise all time's nomenclature?

On the dark piers to paraphrase,

A blue rust dusted to tones of soots,

Plum dark the countenances move in mist

And the seaman's iron-shod boots

On the wet quays loiter and list,

While some lost tug hoots and hoots.

A night of leavetakings and summaries,

Inventory of the capes unwinding

In their old smoke and cursing spray

In scarves of smoking suds—

Never to leave, perhaps, never to go away,

And yet past the heart's reminding

See the soft underthrust of water sway

The spending loin come combing out

Ringlets washed back from a dead sea-king's

Face, a helm of gold, a mask

In the autumnal water's writhing.

To remain and realise were the hardest task.

1966/
1965

By maunding and imposture Helen came,

Eater of the white fig, the sugar-bread;

Some beauty, yes, but not more than her tribe

Lathe-made for stock embraces on a bed.

I am astonished when they talk of her,

The shattered cities, bone from human bone

Torn; defaced altars and the burning hearths.

For such as she deaf impulse worked in men:

They dug up graves and ripped down scions of stone,

In act and wish unseparated then.

The test for cultures this insipid drone!

Yes, for a doll the hero, wild-eyed freak

Howled at his mother's grave, yet stopped to dry

One tear of Helen on the sarcastic cheek.

1966/
1965

In the museums you can find her,

Io, the contemporary street-walker all alive

In bronze and leather, spear in hand,

Her hair packed in some slender helm

Like a tall golden hive—

A fresco of a parody of arms.

Or else on vases rushing to overwhelm

Invaders of the olive or the attic farms:

Reviving warriors, helmets full of water,

Or kneeling to swarthy foreigners,

A hostage, someone's youngest daughter.

All the repulsion and the joy in one.

Well, all afternoon I've reflected on Athens,

The slim statue asleep over there,

Without unduly stressing the classical pallor

Or the emphatic disabused air

Street-girls have asleep; no,

All that will keep, all that will keep.

Soon we must be exiled to different corners

Of the sky; but the inward whiteness harms not

With dark keeping, harms not. Yet perhaps

I should sneak out and leave her here asleep?

Draw tight those arms like silver toils

The Parcae weave as their supreme award

And between deep drawn breaths release

The flying bolt of the unuttered word.

1966/
1965

Capes hereabouts and promontories hold

Boats grazing a cyclopean eyeball,

No less astounding

Snow-tusk or toffee-round hill

In shaggy presences of rock abounding

Charm the sick disputing will.

Old dusty gems of bays go flop:

Water polishes on a sleeve to buff,

Trembles upon an eyelash into stars.

How strange our breathing does not stop.

One sovereign absence should be quite enough?

Tell me, the codes of open flowers,

Lick up the glance to pocket a whole mind.

Nothing precipitates, is left behind,

The island is all eyes. Shout!

The silence ponders, notes, and codifies.

We discover only what we set out to find.

I am at a loss to explain how writing

Turns this way this year, turns and tends—

But the line breaks off as voices do, and ends.

Image coiled in image, eye in eye,

Copying each other like guesses where the water

Only dares swallow up and magnify,

So precise the quiet spools

Gather, forgive, heap up, and lie.

Under such stones to sleep would be

The deepest luxury of the deliberate soul,

By day's revivals or the plumblue fall

Of darkness bending like a hoop the whole—

Desires beyond the white capes of recall.

1966/
1965

Yellow bottles in a barber's door

Turn slowly as if driven by them

The softly squirming colourless mass;

Here they tell the weather by leeches.

Auxiliaries of science too, how on a thigh

Or temporal vein will settle with a sigh

As babes to breast, painless and yet perverse,

Their thirst brings health to the sick,

Impervious to all things but common salt

The ordinary cattle love to lick:

One pinch of that and the creatures die.

Bent like old harpoons

The seamen stoop to bowls, each old

Patched wineskin of the belly sags,

Capricious and indifferent fortune's tolls,

But the old one there who always brags

Will turn to yellow bottles for his lore,

Consult to see though clouds in coma lie

Black on the harbour where men sleep

If he dare snatch his passage from the deep.

1966/
1965

All airs and graces, their prevailing wind

Blows through the tapestry to stiffen

The fading girls, complexions of tea-roses,

With pets upon provincial laps

And hair combed back against the grain

In innocent professional poses

Sit centred, watching time elapse.

Scented abundance of black hair built back

In studied rolls of merchandise to loom

Over strangers' visitations: ladies of pleasure.

Their musical instruments are laid aside,

O lethargy of educated leisure

That palls and yawns between these silken walls.

But one, luckier or younger, stands apart

On a far bridge to enjoy a private wish,

Casting the aquiline fishing-rod of gold

Angles for other kinds of fish.

1980/
1965

They have taken another road,

Dionysus and all his cockledom,

The ogres in dry river beds

Hair flying, breast-bone full of eyes.

A madman walks alone in the dark wood

Swinging a lantern; nobodies march,

Lute-player, card-sharper, politician,

Until here lastly the condign

Majestic stance of something else

Apparelled for death: Byzantium.

The eyes won't change, no, but the

Going forward or going back

Can be read off as on a clock-face.

Here the population of clocks multiplied,

They bore the suffocating fruits of chime, hours.

All day long the belfries reminded

All night the prayers besieged.

A cross rose, wish-bone of the defeated,

The chicken-souled, the guilty.

It has got worse since, of course,

And can hardly get any better now.

A café is the last Museum and best,

To observe a great man in the middle

Of a collapse; but parts work still,

The crutches are incidental, adding variety.

Some injudicious pleasures will remain,

The sexual phosphorescence of youth is gone,

But here on naptha-scented evenings still

He sits before the tulip of old wine,

In a red fez, by some sunken garden,

Watching for shooting-stars.

1966/
1966

Sky star-engraved, the Pleiads up,

Autumn's old ikonography

In falling fruit and turning sea,

The whole spins in a drinking-cup.

Incised the crater of heaven burns

Recovering all she gave,

Into the cooling ground returns

Fruit, star and promiscuous wave,

To die by the universal variable

And scribble on a stone our scope,

The phosphorescence of desire

To a season of wanhope.

Kiss of white caryatids which lean

With broken boxers' noses here

On armatures of lead,

Year after summer year incline

To appear and re-appear.

How much will time exempt in us

How much replace?

Shapes of the carnal void,

Cracked smile of marble mouth,

Starred emblem of a stone embrace.

1966/
1966

To increase your hold

Relax your grip,

Exploit the slip twixt

Cup and lip.

Enjoy and bid and let it grow,

Superior sense of vertigo,

The adepts' sixth infernal sense

Spells passionate indifference,

So by the racing pulse express

A discipline of laziness.

To increase your scope

Relax your hold

Not wish nor hope

One second old

The key to open all the locks

Of this insidious paradox,

Not wish nor hope one second old

So all that glitters may be gold.

1966/
1966

Who told you you were it,

Acrobat without arms,

Ringmaster of the choice whiplash,

Opening and shutting drawers

In long apathies or pedantic calms,

Or barking all night at cliffs

Too high to remember how to climb?

Skippers have other names for you,

Who mark you only by fathom,

But to me a blue specie somehow,

In the nostril of a westerly,

Or T-bone under night spars

Out of some slangy mood disperses,

Carves out a beach in cripples.

Come March and you'll sharpen minds,

Ropes all chewn out, sheets purged,

Or splitting down the middle race

To bang boats together like heads.

No, lion-paw, ape of every mood,

Steeplejack of the tilted breakers,

How nice land feels to watch you go by on.

1966/
1966

The dying business began hereabouts,

A pewter plain, a shrubless frugality,

An anarch sea, cliffs, nothing.

It promised a local action merely

But the death-rot somehow spread from

Limb to limb and mind to mind,

Became endemic. The body politic

Was touched, began to suppurate once more.

An empire began to have dizzy spells,

One fever to cast out another

One man to cast down another.

Who can apportion a historic fault?

A few hundred years of average misery,

A thousand more of abstract villainy,

The precious culture pilfered into dust.

They spoke of starting again at the beginning

But by then few had looked upon it fresh,

And the frenzied young were building away

From it, towards some tributary death.

A little contempt goes a long way,

Smashed well-head with gorgons

Clothed now with self-renewing moss.

1966/
1966

Spoonful of wine, candle-stump and eyes.

The cuckold-mixture as before;

Nothing time so approves

In each superb disguise,

The patents of the wish,

Sweet but deluding law,

The infinities which must discern

A fever's point of no return.

Or a child's voice which calls

Behind tall garden walls,

Calls, and falls silent in despair,

He or she will never be there,

Where images still swarm

And pour from the broken hives

Never to recover the obedient smiles

Nor mend disfigured lives.

Here at this candid hour

By one unfaltering gleam

Remembering it as it glows

The fever's auguries

Till the dismantled dream

Where all the ancient loyalties foreclose.

The road leads softly down

On avenues of darkling recognition,

Compass or sextant none

Towards death's suave audition.

So, harking back to it, spoonful

Candle-stump and eyes one sees

In their majority,

With razors whispering on the lard

What fruit the barbers shave

To the last dimple of the self-regard.

1966/
1966