Collected Poems 1931-74 (28 page)
Read Collected Poems 1931-74 Online
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
                       statues on cubes of frost
                       equestrian pigments of the snow
                       somewhere the carrefour was crossed
                       munching footsteps trail and slow
                       stealthy gravels underfoot
                       sectioned by the tawny bars
                       street lamps fiction up the dusk
                       world unending of past wars
                       when will the exemplars come
                       four steps up
                       four steps down
                       where the sewers discharge
                       by the urinal's turret.
The dreams of Solange confused no issues, solved no problems, for on the auto-screen among our faces appeared always and most often others like Papillon the tramp, a childhood scarecrow built of thorns. He turned the passive albums of her sleep with long fingers, one of them a steel hook. Papillon represented a confederacy of buried impulses which could resurrect among the tangled sheet, a world of obscure
resentments
, fine and brutal as lace, the wedding-cake lying under its elaborate pastry. His ancient visions sited in that crocodile-mask fired her. And such dreams as he recounted revived among her ownâParis as some huge penis sliced up and served around a whole restaurant by masked waiters. And the lovers murmuring âI love you so much I could eat you'. She takes up knife and fork and begins to eat. The screams might awake her, bathed in sweat, to hear the real face of Marc the underwriter saying something like: âAll our ills come from incautious dreaming.' There were so many people in the world, how to count them all? Perhaps causality was a way of uniting god with laughter? Solange avec son Åil luisant et avide, holding a handbag full of unposted cards.
Add to the faces the Japanese student whose halting English was full of felicities only one could notice; as when âLord Byron committed incense with his sister, and afterwards took refuse in the church'. He too for a season cast a spell. Then one day he recited a poem which met with her disfavour.
                       She was eighteen but already god-avowed,
                       She sought out the old philosopher
                       Expressly to couple with him, so to be
                       Bathed in the spray of his sperm
                       The pneuma of his inner idea.
                       Pleasure and instruction were hers,
                       She corrected her course by his visions.
                       But of all this a child was born,
                       But in him, not in her, as a poem
                       With as many legs as a spider
                       In a web the size of a world.
Then Deutre, the latest of our company
Who believed all knowledge to be founded
Deep in the orgasm, rising into emphasis
As individual consciousness, the know-thyself,
Bit by bit, with checks and halts, but always
By successive amnesias dragged into conception,
A school of pneuma for the inward eye
Reflecting rays which pass in deliberate tangence
To the ordinary waking sense, focuses the heart.
Patiently must Solange pan for male gold
White legs spread like geometer's compasses
Over her native city. The milk-teeth fall at last.
Gradually the fangs develop, breathing changes,
And out of the tapestry of monkey grimaces
Born of no diagrams no act of will
But simple subservience to a natural law, He comes,
He emerges, He is there. Who? I do not know.
Deutre presumably in the guise of Rilke's angel
Or Balzac's double mirrored androgyne.
Deutre makes up his lips at dusk,
His sputum is tinged with venous blood.
Nevertheless a purity of intent is established
Simple as on its axis spins an earth.
It was his pleasure to recite
With an emphasis worthy of the Vedas
Passages from the Analysis Situs: as
                      la géometrie Ã
n
dimensions
                      a un objet réel, personne n'en
                      doute aujourd'hui. Les Etres
                      de l'hyperespace sont susceptibles
                      de définitions précises comme ceux
                      de l'espace ordinaire, et si nous
                      ne pouvons les répresenter nous
                      pouvons les concevoir et les étudier.
The third eye belongs to spatial consciousness
He seems to say; there is a way of growing.
It was he who persuaded me at Christmas to go away.
Far southwards to submit myself to other towns
To landscapes more infernal and less purifying.
He persuaded Solange to lend me the money and she
Was glad to repay what the acrobat had spent,
But she saw no point in it, âWho can live outside
Paris, among barbarians, and to what end?
Besides all these places are full of bugs
And you can see them on the cinema without moving
For just a few francs, within reach of a café.
But if go you must I will see you off.'
Remoter than Aldebaran, Deutre smiled.
Only many years later was I able
To repay him with such words as:
âThroughout the living world as we know it
The genetic code is based on four letters,
The Pythagorean Quaternary, as you might say.'
He did not even smile, for he was dying.
Man's achievement of a bipedal gait has freed
His hands for tools, weapons and the embrace.
                     the days will be lengthening
                       into centuries, Solange
                     and neither witness will be there,
                      seek no comparisons among
                       dolls' houses of the rational mind
                      coevals don't compare
                     a gesture broken off by dusk
                     heartless as boredom is or hope
                     blood seeks the soil it has to soak
                     in the fulfilment of a scope
                     fibres of consciousness will grow
                      lavish as any coffin load
                      and every touching entity
                       the puritan grave will swallow up
                      the silences will atrophy.
So we came, riding through the soft lithograph
Of Paris in the rain, the spires
Empting their light, the mercury falling,
Streets draining into the sewers,
The yokel clockface of the Gare de Lyon
On a warehouse wall the word âImputrescible'
Then slowly night: but suddenly
The station was full of special trains,
Long hospital trains with red crosses
Drawn blinds, uniformed nurses, doctors.
Dimly as fish in tanks moved pyjama-clad figures
Severed from the world, one would have said
Fresh from catastrophe, a great battlefield.
âO well the war has come' she said with resignation.
But it was only the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes,
The crippled the lame the insane the halt
All heading southwards towards the hopeless miracle.
Each one felt himself the outside chance,
Thousands of sick outsiders.
A barrel organ played a rotting waltz.
The Government was determined to root out gambling.
My path was not this one; but it equally needed
A sense of goodbye. Firm handclasp of hard little paw,
The clasp of faithful business associates, and
âWhen you come back, you know where to find me.'
                       four steps up
                     four steps down
                       the station ramp eludes
                      the mangy town
                       the temporary visa
                      with the scarlet stamp
                      flowers of soda
                      shower the quays
                      engines piss hot spume
                      giants in labour
                      drip and sweat like these
                      slam the carriage door
                      only this and nothing more.
I write these lines towards dusk
On the other side of the world,
A country with stranger inhabitants,
Chestnut candles, fevers, and white water.
Such small perplexities as vex the mind,
Solange, became for writers precious to growth,
But the fluttering sails disarm them,
Wet petals sticking to a sky born nude.
The magnitudes, insights, fears and proofs
Were your unconscious gift. They still weigh
With the weight of Paris forever hanging
White throat wearing icy gems,
A parody of stars as yet undiscovered.
Here they tell me I have come to terms.
But supposing I had chosen to march on you
Instead of on such a starâwhat then?
Instead of this incubus of infinite duration,
I mean to say, whose single glance
Brings loving to its knees?
Yes, wherever the ant-hills empty
Swarm the fecund associations, crossing
And recrossing the sky-pathways of sleep.
We labour only to be relatively
Sincere as ants perhaps are sincere.
Yet always the absolute vision must keep
The healthy lodestar of its stake in love.
You'll see somewhere always the crystal body
Transparent, held high against the light
Blaze like a diamond in the deep.
How can a love of life be ever indiscreet
For even in that far dispersing city today
Ants must turn over in their sleep.
1980/
1969
Â
For
Miriam
Cendrars
Later some of these heroic worshippers
May live out one thrift in a world of options,
The crown of thorns, the bridal wreath of love,
Desires in all their motions.
âAs below, darling, so above.'
In one thought focus and resume
The thousand contradictions,
And still with a sigh these warring fictions.
Timeless as water into language flowing,
Molten as snow on new burns,
The limbo of half-knowing
Where the gagged conscience twists and turns,
Will plant the flag of their unknowing.
It is not peace we seek but meaning.
To convince at last that all is possible,
That the feeble human finite must belong
Within the starred circumference of wonder,
And waking alone at night so suddenly
Realise how careful one must be with hateâ
For you become what you hate too much,
As when you love too much you fraction
By insolence the fine delight â¦
It is not meaning that we need but sight.
1973/
1971
You and who else?
Who else? Why Nobody.
I shall be weeks or months away now
Where the diving roads divide,
A solitude with little dignity,
Where forests lie, where rivers pine,
In a great hemisphere of loveless sky:
And your letters will cross mine.
Somewhere perhaps in a cobweb of skyscrapers
Between Fifth and Sixth musing I'll go,
Matching some footprints in young snow,
Within the loving ambush of some heart,
So close and yet so very far apart â¦
I don't know, I just don't know.
Two beings watching the skyscrapers fade,
Rose in the falling sleet or
Phantom green, licking themselves
Like great cats at their toilet,
Licking their paws clean.
I shall hesitate and falter, that much I know.
Moreover, do you suppose, you too
When you reach India at last, as you will,
I'll be back before two empty coffee cups
And your empty chair in our shabby bistro;
You'll have nothing to tell me either, no,
Not the tenth part of a sigh to exchange.
Everything will be just so.
I'll be back alone again
Confined in memory, but nothing to report,
Watching the traffic pass and
Dreaming of footprints in the New York snow.
1973/
1971
