Collected Poems 1931-74 (28 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Durrell

BOOK: Collected Poems 1931-74
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                        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.

VI

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 own—Paris as some huge penis sliced up and served around a whole restaurant by masked waiters. And the lovers murmuring ‘I 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: ‘All 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 œil 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 ‘Lord 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 à
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, ‘Who 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:

‘Throughout 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 ‘Imputrescible'

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.

‘O 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

‘When 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 star—what 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
 

THE RECKONING

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.

‘As 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 hate—

For you become what you hate too much,

As when you love too much you fraction

By insolence the fine delight …

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 …

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

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