Collected Poems 1931-74 (9 page)

Image, Image, Image answer

Whether son or whether daughter,

The persuader or the dancer:

A bird's beak poking out of the flesh,

A bird's beak singing between the eyes.

‘The earth is a loaf,

Image, Image, Image,

The wet part is joined to the dry,

Like the joints of Adam.'

It is dark now. Rise.

Between the Nonself and the Self

Cover the little wound

With soft red clay,

From the hit of the wind of Death,

From the chink of the pin of Day.

The heart's cold singing part,

Image of the Dancer in water,

Close up with the soft red clay

The wound in the mystical bud:

For the dancers walking in the water

This is the body, this the blood.

1946/
1942

You sleeping child asleep, away

Between the confusing world of forms,

The lamplight and the day; you lie

And the pause flows through you like glass,

Asleep in the body of the nautilus.

Between comparison and sleep,

Lips that move in quotation;

The turning of a small blind mind

Like a plant everywhere ascending.

Now our love has become a beanstalk.

Invent a language where the terms

Are smiles; someone in the house now

Only understands warmth and cherish,

Still twig-bound, learning to fly.

This hand exploring the world makes

The diver's deep-sea fingers on the sills

Of underwater windows; all the wrecks

Of our world where the sad blood leads back

Through memory and sense like divers working.

Sleep, my dear, we won't disturb

You, lying in the zones of sleep.

The four walls symbolise love put about

To hold in silence which so soon brims

Over into sadness: it's still dark.

Sleep and rise a lady with a flower

Between your teeth and a cypress

Between your thighs: surely you won't ever

Be puzzled by a poem or disturbed by a poem

Made like fire by the rubbing of two sticks?

1943/
1
942

The roads lead southward, blue

Along a circumference of snow,

Identified now by the scholars

As a home for the cyclops, a habitation

For nymphs and ancient appearances.

Only the shepherd in his cowl

Who walks upon them really knows

The natural history in a sacred place;

Takes like a text of stone

A familiar cloud-shape or fortress,

Pointing at what is mutually seen,

His dark eyes wearing the crowsfoot.

Our idols have been betrayed

Not by the measurement of the dead ones

Who are lying under these mountains,

As under England our own fastidious

Heroes lie awake but do not judge.

Winter rubs at the ice like a hair,

Dividing time; and a single tree

Reflects here a mythical river.

Water limps on ice, or scribbles

On doors of sand its syllables,

All alone, in an empty land, alone.

This is what breaks the heart.

We say that the blood of Virgil

Grew again in the scarlet pompion,

Ever afterwards reserving the old poet

Memorials in his air, his water: so

In this land one encounters always

Agamemnon, Agamemnon; the voice

Of water falling on hair in caves,

The stonebreaker's hammer on walls,

A name held closer in the circles

Of bald granite than even these cyclamen,

Like children's ears attentive here,

Blown like glass from the floors of snow.

Truly, we the endowed who pass here

With the assurance of visitors in rugs

Can raise from the menhir no ghost

By the cold sound of English idioms.

Our true parenthood rests with the eagle,

We recognize him turning over his vaults.

Bones have no mouths to smile with

From the beds of companionable rivers dry.

The modern girls pose on a tomb smiling;

Night watches us on the western horn;

The hyssop and the vinegar have lost their meaning,

And this is what breaks the heart.

1943/
1942

He is the man who makes notes,

The observer in the tall black hat,

Face hidden in the brim:

In three European cities

He has watched me watching him.

The street-corner in Buda and after

By the post-office a glimpse

Of the disappearing tails of his coat,

Gave the same illumination, spied upon,

The tightness in the throat.

Once too meeting by the Seine

The waters a moving floor of stars,

He had vanished when I reached the door,

But there on the pavement burning

Lay one of his familiar black cigars.

The meeting on the dark stairway

Where the tide ran clean as a loom:

The betrayal of her, her kisses

He has witnessed them all: often

I hear him laughing in the other room.

He watches me now, working late,

Bringing a poem to life, his eyes

Reflect the malady of De Nerval:

O useless in this old house to question

The mirrors, his impenetrable disguise.

1943/
1942

Three women have slept with my books,

Penelope among admirers of the ballads,

Let down her hair over my exercises

But was hardly aware of me; an author

Of tunes which made men like performing dogs;

She did not die but left me for a singer in a wig.

Later Ariadne read of
The
Universe,

Made a journey under the islands from her own

Green home, husband, house with olive trees.

She lay with my words and let me breathe

Upon her face; later fell like a gull from the

Great ledge in Scio. Relations touched her body

Warm and rosy from the oil like a scented loaf,

Not human any more—but not divine as they had hoped.

You who pass the islands will perhaps remember

The lovely Ion, harmless, patient and in love.

Our quarrels disturbed the swallows in the eaves,

The wild bees could not work in the vine;

Shaken and ill, one of true love's experiments,

It was she who lay in the stone bath dry-eyed,

Having the impression that her body had become

A huge tear about to drop from the eye of the world.

We never learned that marriage is a kind of architecture,

The nursery virtues were missing, all of them,

So nobody could tell us why we suffered.

It would be untrue to say that
The
Art
of
Marriage

And the others:
Of
Peace
in
the
Self
and
Of
Love

Brought me no women; I remember bodies, arms, faces,

But I have forgotten their names.

Finally I am here. Conon in exile on Andros

Like a spider in a bottle writing the immortal

Of
Love
and
Death,
through the bodies of those

Who slept with my words but did not know me.

An old man with a skinful of wine

Living from pillow to poke under a vine.

At night the sea roars under the cliffs.

The past harms no one who lies close to the Gods.

Even in these notes upon myself I see

I have put down women's names like some

Philosophical proposition. At last I understand

They were only forms for my own ideas,

With names and mouths and different voices.

In them I lay with myself, my style of life,

Knowing only coitus with the shadows,

By our blue Aegean which forever

Washes and pardons and brings us home.

1943/
1
942

I found your Horace with the writing in it;

Out of time and context came upon

This lover of vines and slave to quietness,

Walking like a figure of smoke here, musing

Among his high and lovely Tuscan pines.

All the small-holder's ambitions, the yield

Of wine-bearing grape, pruning and drainage

Laid out by laws, almost like the austere

Shell of his verses—a pattern of Latin thrift;

Waiting so patiently in a library for

Autumn and the drying of the apples;

The betraying hour-glass and its deathward drift.

Surely the hard blue winterset

Must have conveyed a message to him—

The premonitions that the garden heard

Shrunk in its shirt of hair beneath the stars,

How rude and feeble a tenant was the self,

An Empire, the body with its members dying—

And unwhistling now the vanished Roman bird?

The fruit-trees dropping apples; he counted them;

The soft bounding fruit on leafy terraces,

And turned to the consoling winter rooms

Where, facing south, began the great prayer,

With his reed laid upon the margins

Of the dead, his stainless authors,

Upright, severe on an uncomfortable chair.

Here, where your clear hand marked up

‘The hated cypress' I added ‘Because it grew

On tombs, revealed his fear of autumn and the urns',

Depicting a solitary at an upper window

Revising metaphors for the winter sea: ‘O

Dark head of storm-tossed curls'; or silently

Watching the North Star which like a fever burns

Away the envy and neglect of the common,

Shining on this terrace, lifting up in recreation

The sad heart of Horace who must have seen it only

As a metaphor for the self and its perfection—

A burning heart quite constant in its station.

Easy to be patient in the summer,

The light running like fishes among the leaves,

Easy in August with its cones of blue

Sky uninvaded from the north; but winter

With its bareness pared his words to points

Like stars, leaving them pure but very few.

He will not know how we discerned him, disregarding

The pose of sufficiency, the landed man,

Found a suffering limb on the great Latin tree

Whose roots live in the barbarian grammar we

Use, yet based in him, his mason's tongue;

Describing clearly a bachelor, sedentary,

With a fond weakness for bronze-age conversation,

Disguising a sense of failure in a hatred for the young,

Who built in the Sabine hills this forgery

Of completeness, an orchard with a view of Rome;

Who studiously developed his sense of death

Till it was all around him, walking at the circus,

At the baths, playing dominoes in a shop—

The escape from self-knowledge with its tragic

Imperatives:
Seek,
suffer,
endure.
The Roman

In him feared the Law and told him where to stop.

So perfect a disguise for one who had

Exhausted death in art—yet who could guess

You would discern the liar by a line,

The suffering hidden under gentleness

And add upon the flyleaf in your tall

Clear hand: ‘Fat, human and unloved,

And held from loving by a sort of wall,

Laid down his books and lovers one by one,

Indifference and success had crowned them all.'

1946/
1943
 

Tread softly, for here you stand

On miracle ground, boy.

A breath would cloud this water of glass,

Honey, bush, berry and swallow.

This rock, then, is more pastoral, than

Arcadia is, Illyria was.

Here the cold spring lilts on sand.

The temperature of the toad

Swallowing under a stone whispers: ‘Diamonds,

Boy, diamonds, and juice of minerals!'

Be a saint here, dig for foxes, and water,

Mere water springs in the bones of the hands.

Turn from the hearth of the hero. Think:

Other men have their emblems, I this:

The heart's dark anvil and the crucifix

Are one, have hammered and shall hammer

A nail of flesh, me to an island cross,

Where the kestrel's arrow falls only,

The green sea licks.

1943/
1943