Collected Poems 1931-74 (29 page)

That noise will be the rain again,

Hush-falling absolver of together—

Companionable enough, though, here abroad:

The log fire, some conclusive music, loneliness.

I can visualise somebody at the door

But make no name or shape for such an image,

Just a locus for small thefts

As might love us both awake tomorrow,

An echo off the lead and ownerless.

But this hissing rain won't improve anything.

The roads will be washed out. Thinking falters.

My book-lined walls so scholarly,

So rosy, glassed in by the rain.

I finger the sex of many an uncut book.

Now spring is coming you will get home

Later and later in another climate.

You vanished so abruptly it took me by surprise.

I heard to relearn everything again

As if blinded by a life of tiny braille.

Then a whole year with just one card,

From Madrid. ‘It is raining here and

Greco is so sombre. I have decided

At last to love nobody but myself.'

I repeat it in an amused way

Sometimes very late at night.

In an amazed way as anyone might

Looking up from a classic into all the

Marvellous rain-polished darkness.

As if suddenly you had gone

Beyond the twelfth desire:

You and memory both become

Contemporary to all this inner music.

Time to sift out our silences, then:

Time to repair the failing fire.

1973/
1971

Aphros Aphrodite the sperm-born one

Could not collect her longings, she had only one,

Soft as a lettuce to the sound,

A captive of one light and longing

Driven underground.

Sadness is only a human body

Seeking the arbitration of heaven,

In the wrong places, under the rose,

In the unleavened leaven.

Tell what wistful kisses travel

Over the skin-heaven of the mind

To where an
amor
fati
waits

With fangs drawn back, to bleed

Whoever she can find.

But vines lay no eggs, honey,

And even apostles come to their senses

Sooner or later you may find.

The three Themes of this witchcraft

Are roses, faeces and vampires.

May they bring you a level mind.

1973/
1971

From a winter of vampires he selects one,

Takes her to a dark house, undresses her:

It is not at all how the story-books say

But another kind of reversed success.

A transaction where the words themselves

Begin to bleed first and everything else follows.

The dissolution of the egg

In the mind of the lady suggests new

Paths to follow, less improbable victories,

Just as illusory as the old, I fear.

Well, but when the embraces go astray,

When you finger the quick recipes

Of every known suggestion, why,

The whole prosperity of the flesh may be in question.

1973/
1971

As for him, he'll die one day for sure.

But you, you'll turn into a word.

How pathless the waters of language!

Now others will speak this word aloud,

Others constrain you with this noun.

There are purchases in the mind

For such a word, at once vulnerable

Yet strong to take root. Wait and see.

It might be something a dead Greek

Felt about sirens or a Pythia,

One sole sound in the huge glossary

Of whispers, the code of love….

Then, after, with death forfeited,

To melt upon the silence of the tongue,

A Margaret or a second Helen,

Half-dreaded hauntress of the waking dream.

1980/
1971

About loving, and such kindred matters

You could be beguiling enough;

Delicacy, constancy and depth—

We examined every artificial prison,

And all with the necessary sincerity, yes.

Some languages have little euphemisms

Which modify suddenly one's notions,

Alter one's whole way of adoring:

Such as your character for ‘death',

Which reads simply ‘A stepping forever

Into a whiteness without remission.'

With no separation-anxiety I presume?

Surely to love is to coincide a little?

And after I contracted your own mightier

Loneliness, I became really ill myself.

But grateful for the thorny knowledge of you;

And thank you for the choice of time and place.

I would perhaps have asked you away

To my house by the sea, to revive us both,

In absolute solitude and dispassionately,

But all the time I kept seeing the severed head,

Lying there, eyes open, in your lap.

1973/
1971

Deep waters hereabouts.

We could quit caring.

Deep waters darling

We could stop feeling,

You could stop sharing

But neither knife nor gun

From the pockets of mischance pointing;

How slowly we all sink down

This lustful anointing

Ankles first and thighs.

The beautiful grenades

Breasts up to lips and eyes

The vertebrae of believing

And the deep water moving

We could abandon supposing

We could quit knowing

Where we have come from

Where we are going.

1973/
1971
 

I, a slave, chained to an oar of poem,

Inhabiting this faraway province where

Nothing happens. I wouldn't want it to.

I have expressly deprived myself of much:

Conversation, sweets of friendship, love …

The public women of the town don't appeal.

I wouldn't want them to. There are no others,

At least for an old, smelly, covetous bookman.

So many things might have fed this avocation,

But what's the point? It's too late.

About the matter of death I am convinced,

Also that peace is unattainable and destiny

Impermeable to reason. I am lucky to have

No grave illness, I suppose, no wounds

To ache all winter. I do not drink or smoke.

From all these factors I select one, the silence

Which is that jewel of divine futility,

Refusal to bow, the unvarnished grain

Of the mind's impudence: you see it so well

On the faces of self-reliant dead.

1973/
1971

Waters rebribing a new moon are all

Dissenting mirrors ending in themselves.

Go away, leave me alone.

Someone still everywhere nearby

So full of fervent need the mouth

The jewelry of smiling: a confession,

Tidemarks of old intentions' dying fall,

Surely that is all now, that is all?

People don't want the experience

Any more: they want an explanation,

How you go about it, when and why.

But all you can say is: Look, it's manifest

And nobody's to blame: it has no name.

Spades touch a buried city,

Calm bodies suffocated by ashes

It happened so quickly there was no time,

Their minds were overrun

The sentry stiffened over a jammed gun,

And waters bribing a new moon are all

The flesh's memories beyond recall.

The voice may have come from a cloud

But more likely the garden's wet planes

A bird or a woman calling in the mist

Asking if anything remains, and if so

Which witch? Which witch? Witch!

I am the only one who knows.

1973/
1971

The year his heart wore out—

It was not you nor you

Distributing the weight

Of benefits of doubt.

A surgeon season came

And singled loving out.

A power-cut in a vein

To abruptly caption stone,

And echoing in the mind

Some mindless telephone.

Prophets of discontent,

Impenetrable shades

It was not you nor you

Nor something left unsaid

To elaborate the night,

But a corn-sifting wind

Was never far behind.

Be steadfast where you are

Now, in the sibyllic mind,

His one companionable star.

It was not you nor you

The year his heart wore out

But cryptic as a breath

One crystal changed its hue;

Thus words in music drown,

Comparisons are few,

Nor will we ever know,

Tellurian loveliness,

Which way the fearless waters flow

That softly fathom you.

1973/
1971

How elapsing our women

Bought with lullaby money

To fill with moon-fluids,

To goad quench and drench with

Quicksilver of druids

Each nonpareil wench.

How spicy their blood is

How tiny their hands

They were netted like quail

In faraway lands.

Come, pretty little ogre

With the fang in your lip

Lest time in its turnings

Should give us the slip.

1973/
1971

Commission silence for a line or two,

These walls, these trees—time out of mind

Are temples to perfection lightly spent,

Sunbribed and apt in their shadowy stresses,

Where the planes hang heads, lies

Something the mind caresses;

And then—hardly noticed at noon

Bells bowling, the sistrum bonged

From steeples half asleep in bugle water.

(This part to be whispered only.)

To go or stay is really not the question;

Nor even to go forever, one can't allow here

Death as a page its full relapse.

In such a nook it would always be perhaps,

Dying with no strings attached—who could do that?

1973/
1971

Supposing once the dead were to combine

Against us with a disciplined hysteria.

Particular ghosts might then trouble

With professional horrors like

Corpses in evening dress,

Photoglyphs from some ancient calendar

Pictographs of lost time.

The smile frail as a toy night-light

Beside a sleeping infant's bed.

The pallor would be unfeigned,

The child smile in its sleep.

To see them always in memory

Descending a spiral staircase slowly

With that peculiar fond regard

Or else out in silent gardens

Under stone walls, a snapped fountain,

Wild violets there uncaring

Wild cyclamen uncurling

In silence, in loaf-leisure.

Or a last specialised picture

Flickering on the retina perhaps

The suave magnificence of a late

Moon, trying not to insist too much.

Emotions are just pampered mirrors,

Thriftless provinces, penurious settlers.

How to involve all nature in every breath?

1973/
1971

The rapt moonwalkers or mere students

Of the world-envelope are piercing

Into the earth's crust to punctuate

Soils and waters with cherished trees

Or cobble with vines, they know it;

Yet have never elaborated a philosophy

Of finite time. I wonder why? Those

Who watch late over the lambs, whom sleep

Deserts because there's thunder in the air.

Just before dawn the whole of nature

Growls in a darkness of impatience.

The season-watchers just march on

Inventing pruning-hooks, winnowing fans

Or odd manual extensions like the spade

Inside the uniform flow of the equinoxes

Not puzzled any more, having forgotten

How brief and how precarious life was,

But finding it chiefly true yet various,

With no uncritical submission to the Gods.

1973/
1971

Perfume of old bones,

Indian bones distilled

In these slender batons;

A whiff of brown saints,

An Indian childhood. Joss.

More mysterious than the opaque

Knuckles of frankincense

The orthodox keep to swamp

Their Easter ikons with today.

The images repeat repent repent (
da
capo
)

A second childhood, born again in Greece.

O the benign power, the providing power

Is here too with its reassurance honey.

After the heartbreak of the long voyage,

Same lexicon, stars over the water.

Hello there! Demon of sadness,

You with the coat of many colours,

The necklace of cannibals' teeth.

You with the extravagant arch

To your instep, a woman walking alone

In the reign of her forgiveness

In the rain.

Moi,
qui
ai
toujours
guetté
le
sublime

Me
voici
de
nouveau
dans
le
pétrin,

Hunting the seven keys to human stress,

The search always one minute old,

A single word to transcend all others,

A single name buried excalibur in a stone.

1973/
1971