Collected Poems 1931-74 (27 page)
Read Collected Poems 1931-74 Online
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
The pure form, then, must be the silence?
I'd tear out a leaf of it and spread it,
The second skin of music, yes,
And with a drypoint then etch in quick
Everything that won't talk back, like
Frost or rain or the budget of spring:
Even some profligate look or profitable
Embraceâhere to imprison it,
So full of a gay informal logic,
A real reality realising itself,
No pressures but candid as a death,
A full foreknowledge of the breathing game
Taut as a bent bow the one simple life
Too soon over, too soon cold; memory
Will combine for you voice, odour, smile.
1973/
1968
This poem was originally written at the same time as âElegy on the Closing of the French Brothels' (
c.
1938), but I wasn't happy with it and the draft was left behind in a notebook until 1967, when I retouched it and lengthened it by about half.
Solange Bequille b. 1915 supposedly
Far from Paris towards April sometime,
Familiar of the familiar XIV arrondissement
                       four steps up
                         four steps down
                         two three four
five
                         where the sewers discharge
                         by the turret of an urinal
                         six seven eight
                          steel ducts voiding
                          in shade and out of the wind â¦
Relatively impossible despite so much practice
To word-parody the tantamount step, but easier
Copy for the lens a powder-blue raincoat, beret,
Cicada brooch, belted and bolted waist of wasp,
Dumb insolent regimental shoes, sheeny rings,
The whole of it amberstuck through twenty winters,
Carried round the globe in damp suitcases,
Some pedlar's pack of visionary ware like
Her rings of a vulgar water reflecting
                        black testicles of buoys
                       tugging at the Seine
                       lovers in leaden coffins
                       pelting the dead with crusts
                        the prohibitions of loneliness
                        being twenty-two with a war
                        hanging over them, its belly hard,
                       noting the orgasm of Hegel
                       defining all death as âthe
                       collapse into immediacy'.
                       Ah, dangerous salients of youth,
                        loving in a crucial month.
Over the bridges the meandering scholars
Deambulating flowed over the Pons Asinorum
Of the five arts between the capable white
Wide-flowing thighs of their seventh muse,
A sharpshooter by a steel turret
Waiting to smelt down whole faculties,
Captives of youthful salt with their elaborate tensions,
They passed and passed but always hesitated,
Leaving their satchels when they could not pay,
The score was kept on a matchboard wall.
A hundred a quick one, five the whole night,
Whole doctorates granted in prime embraces.
The arts of the capital being matured and focused.
Five for the collective wisdom of this great city!
                      baisers O noirs essaims
                      desires grown fair of dark
                      the cross-roads of smiling eyes
                       complexities of season, spring
                       or winter's black water
                        bridges of funereal soot
                        working with pink tongue or tooth
                        towards some mystical emphasis,
                        a life without sanctions
                        in the forever, so long ago,
                      so far away from all this
                       contemporary whimperdom
                                         Solange
                        sole angel of the seekers,
                       their prop medal and recourse
                      faces crisper than oak-leaves
                      your burial service covered all
                      the coward and the brave
                      the perfectly solid fact as
                      symbol of humanity's education
                      less a woman with legs than
                      something, say that oven into which
                      Descartes locked himself in order
                      to enunciate the first principle
                      of his system; the oven Planck
                      consulted after all the
                      spectroscope's thrilling finery
                      to deduce the notion of quanta.
                      Always the same oven, never any bread,
                      the XXth century loaf is an equation
                                         Solange
                       be like mirrors accumulating nothing.
The change from C major to A flat
Is always associated with summary thefts,
Certain women powdered by suns,
Street-lamps' fresh breath in cradles,
As simply as birds reacting to rain
We recover small fragments of the unknowable
To render back to nature her darkest intents
In allegorical bandages of old hotels
Receiving into their no-womb the anti-heroes,
Tang of the metro and rotting dustbins
Needles seeking the iron vein
Astrology's damp syringe
                        a woman of good intent
                      distributing the river winds,
                       drawing with scarlet fingernail
                        on foggy panes high above Paris,
                        one glassed-in balcony
                       with tubs for plants' green hives
                       so apt for tall trees' dews
                       days robbed and nights replaced
                        whatever the single vision traced
                        four steps up
                       four steps down
                        wherever the emphasis was placed
                        whoever the woman's image finds
                         dyed into living minds
By the dead butts of infernal cinemas
Or at the Medrano lulled by some old
Circus animal's tarnished roars,
See the heads discharged by guns in baskets falling
Smelling of new bread or blood. The muscles
Now hanging in Museums, the thoracic cage shaken
By typical sobs, the eyes of congers' spawn,
Then the plumage of soft shrieks in dark streets,
The running feet, silence, and something lying
In Paris on such April nights when stars
Crunch underfoot the Luxembourg's cool gravels,
Night poised like a lion's paw
Where her prowl crosses some angle of the abstract town.
                      four steps up
                      four steps down
                      where the sewers discharge
                      by the urinal's turret
                       stairs too narrow for the coffin,
                       minds too narrow for recognitions,
                       hearts too severe for introspection,
                       different categories of the same
                       insolent vision marrying
                      four steps up
                       confederates of the darkness
                       soon they must all die or
                       go away, soon you will be left
                        alone, writing wholly for yourself,
                        struggling with the idea of a city
                        a whore of the city's inward meaning,
                       animal intents all bruising
                       the wingpoint of other myths
                        outmoded or outvoted gods
                       the muffled censors of the time
                      ripening in the latest ages
                      beyond the scope of liveried men
                      past the intentions of the wise
                      towards a death promoted by the sages.
Even then was he somehow able to undress his dolls' thoughts to sleep beside the sleeper, lay figures of the dreams which uncoiled among the mnemonic centres of the mind which thinks without knowing that it thinks, slips, punctures process with ideas. Faut-il enfin dépasser le point de tangence qui sépare l'art et la science, tout en les traitant comme les religions primitives en faillite? Oui mais comment? Even then, even then; but his snores might not awake the tiny amorous snores as of the congress of guinea-pigs in vivisectionists' cages, unaware of being watched, syringe in hand. Et le chaos même, dandy ou nègre? Faut-il éprouver la plénitude charnelle d'un acte spontané? In the cheap edition of âCausality' she had given Leibniz a moustache and printed a lipstick kiss to hide the crucial figure, adding in the margin the proverbial merde. If only she could have delivered him from the vices of introspection, the verses in p'tit nègre, the torn paper tablecloths with their thorny sketches; but alas vers libre is like le ver solitaire. The head shows and the atlas of the stare; it can be broken off by the forceps, but there will always be more packed in the gut. Beware.
                       the communes raise their walls
                       around the dreamer's bed,
                       cold crusts of cults devoured
                       the science-mocking magics spread
                       like viruses distributed
                       by the redeemers' dreams
                       on altars sourly smoke
                       the witnesses disperse
                       among the smoke of thought
                       to share the ignoble joke
                       some medieval urinals
                       mingle the proferred wine
                       to pour from snouts of stone
                       the griffins far below
                       on the river's quays
                       famous star-waterways incline
                       turn water into wine,
                       the simple torturers go
                       when night undresses all the trees
                       unsleeping gargoyles tell you so.
Born of torpid country-folk versed in cumbrous ways and too haphazard to chime with this spawn of factories with anvils and poisonous oxygen, this decomposing fabric of stone, the sepia cards of churches begging for disablement pensions; but kindly stubborn intractable stock, she imported into the deadly estate of the town frail rural virtues, rotted in a primeval humus. Gone this Solange or that, but the mould remained unbroken revolving through worlds of dissimulation, spheres, hatcheries of unique sensation, seen through the pinshead of a tiny mind. Turning slightly towards the sun as winter flowers may do, the bonfires and speeches and the eternal inquests within the frontiers of the self, still the fated questions yawned as they do for all of us. And what then of Pascal, the man she loved: sullen, morose and leaden when not in the air flying from ring to ring with an acrobat's fury, the webbed feet, sympelmous toes, O rabid specialist in a bird's beauty. They exchanged wordless days, and doses, the sempiternal clap. In full flight over the city he took her like a ring, swung over the edge of the abyss. I studied their famous loves to reimburse myself. Once I saw the expression on his face which must have settled her fateâin mid-air swinging in an orgasm of fear and stress, but shriven too; this look had impaled her mind. Then he went, without saying goodbye, perhaps on tour, but never to return I believe; perhaps much later to dangle from some whore's rafter or at the end of a silken parachute illustrating some mysterious law. But his undertow haunted her body for a season, celebrated in absinthe and funereal silences; many profited from this experience, many coupled through her with the wiry loins and loafing smile.
