Collected Poems 1931-74 (26 page)

the soft
quem
quam
will be Scops the Owl

    conjugation of nouns, a line of enquiry,

powdery stubble of the socratic prison

    laurels crack like parchments in the wind,

who walks here in the violet dust at night

    by the tower of the winds and water-clocks?

    tapers smoke upon open coffins

surely the shattered pitchers must one day

    revive in the gush of marble breathing up?

    call again softly, and again,

the fresh spring empties like a vein

    no children spit on their reflected faces

but from the blazing
souk
below the passive smells

    bread urine cooking printing-ink

will tell you what the sullen races think

    and among the tombs gnawing of mandolines

confounding sleep with carnage where

    strangers still arrive like sleepy gods

    dismount at nightfall at desolate inns.

1966/
1966

We aliens are too greedy. They took their time,

Being sure there was abundance of such

Blueness, waters of mint in sheaves,

Demotic and reasonable the sky through leaves.

Easy does it, they said; it did much the same,

Echoed the confidence of infinite extension:

Nothing specially prudent or benign

About Greek space or form or line,

Yet beyond it lay the promise of heirs—

The future like the past was theirs.

Man sat a boat like a gull,

Gull sat a rock like a star,

All fishermen's lecheries entangled were,

Sharing the diversionary water-dream,

The hunter's pious stare,

Till finally the silence was supreme

And neither any more was really there.

Only … oar hankered for the blue,

Prow ached for it, rope had a mind to stretch,

Anchor to plummet and to delve,

So a harmony of reciprocal functions grew

Between the none-existent two, a truce

While the same horizon softly insisted:

‘The perfect circle is incapable of further development.'

1966/
1966

I cannot read Pliny without terror.

It seems that in trees the sap

Is moon-governed, rising and falling

In absolute surrender, and if trees

Then the menstrual pattern reconverts

Some rhythms into human sap

For the night's silver thermometer.

Easy to knock off branches in your sleep,

Overturn and sever the whole trunk,

But how to stop the perpetual bleeding?

I cannot tell, but so much is clear,

Freewill is simply another carnal proverb

Of worthless minds. A man standing,

Leaning at a gate waiting, a frugal décor,

Either in some northern city of steel vegetation

Or in the ungovernable brilliance

Of an island, at the same gate the same man

Waiting, can be seen less as animal

Than mineral, a besotted cistern

For wine or blood, ebbing and flowing,

Waxing and waning in the ungovernable fury

Of something's phosphorescence. Yet he waits,

He simply waits and smokes and goes on waiting,

You know why, you know when, you know for whom.

1966/
1966

A falling mulberry stained this page

As it might have been under the golden barrel

Of a microscope the eosin-stained précis

Of a war fought in the long blue canals

Of the human heart, red corps against the white:

Dominion of one or other love disproving.

Meanwhile upon the outer rind there is

No sickness in the heart of time,

The fruit breathes on the tree and gestures,

The bark fresh, the leafage of hands dewy

Drives the beautiful wand of your flesh

Upwards into another spring, sap rising.

1966/
1966

When one smile grazed the surface

Nobody breathed and nobody spoke,

As ringed as a tree's old age

Or stone-splashed circles in water

Widening out to infinity the joke—

Neither he nor they nor the mage.

In their silence one can recognise

The illnesses it was invented to heal.

Yes, pattern of brush or pen have merit

But the other thing does not feel

And leaves nothing to inherit,

The historian's dusty archives etc.

All the rhetoric of the unreal.

So the peculiar smile broke cover

Sharp as the Pleiads of a new unknowing

To lap at the confines of our reason still,

The purposeless coming and going,

The never quite never quite still.

Nor does it matter much, given the fact

The date the season and the hour

That I have forgotten not the smile

Kasyapa, but the name of the flower.

1966/
1966

River the Roman legionary noosed:

Seven piers whose sharpened fangs

Slide from stone gums to soothe and comb

Where the lustrous nervous water hangs.

A stagnant town: a someone's home-from-home.

If the bored consular ghost should reappear

He would re-pose the question with a sigh,

Find it unanswered still: ‘What under heaven

Could a Roman find to amuse him here?'

It won't: he's gone on furlough unregretted,

Now powdered with drowsy lilies, hobbled,

Dusted by old Orion the glib waterfloor

A planet-cobbled darkness re-inters

The history the consul found a bore.

Pour sky in water, softly mix and wait,

While birds whistle and sprain and curve …

They must have faltered here at the very gate

Of Gaul, seduced by such provender, such rich turf

Bewitched, and made their sense of duty swerve.

No less now under awnings half asleep

Pale functionaries of a similar sort of creed

All afternoon a river-watching keep,

Two civil servants loitering over aniseed.

1966/
1966

Cornelia, dry your cheek, poor shade,

This last and most exact of visions,

Old wedding-rings our fires won't eat

Ash under grey cypresses,

Old half-forgotten implausible decisions

By going leaving you incomplete.

                                         And now your message: yes,

                                         Our house is very still,

                                         And at the third watch always

                                         I conceive your five fingers

                                         Softly placed upon a sill,

What to convey? I saw how gluttonous

Candles smack their meek fat lips,

Oaken pyres, the small skull broken open,

Lick out the ears with a befriending kiss.

Who spoke? Who heard? What was confided?

No, you simply woke that morning and decided

To refund your private meaning into This.

Water entering water forever keeps

Her identical flavour: so one death into Death,

The abstract portions of a simple whole,

Soon the sweet seasons claim control.

It would be squandering you to tell

With what precision we were given

A form for all our looking-for in loving,

The looking-glass, the spell,

An embrace becomes didactic and less moving

Although the autumns harden and I live,

Still learning, eye to eye, mind mind, lip lip,

Thus have you taken all I could not give.

                                    From cellars full of dark air

                                    An introspection costing life

                                    Reducing death's dimension,

                                    Cuts through feeling like a knife.

Yet even more deeply sounded,

With more rapid pulse those fevers,

By broken seamarks, in old granaries,

Among ferns, stones, olive-trees,

Costumes of old deceivers,

Where once you so abounded

I feel our grave latin code insist

And what you are and were become confounded.

So close at hand as never to be missed.

You were that search for the Sovereign Form

Which each of us owns, and each

Must find and bury: all the disciplines

We only summarise in simple dying,

It is all there, we know it, within reach,

Nor is there ever any hurry,

For those who get beyond the maze of speech

To where such vision waits, all knots untying.

That Form perhaps like the dew-lined ‘form'

Of some solitary hare in frosty grass

On the unfrequented mountainsides

Of the mind's inmost narrative mind:

Yes, only there you know the search has ended,

Cornelia, and she's rediscovered,

Image of silence and all deaths befriended.

1966/
1966

Capacities in doubt and lovers failing?

We feel time freshen but we keep on sailing.

No, sir, I do not cannibalise my fellow-man

In writing of him. I just fict.

Unfashionable if you wish, or even unreal

So to evict the owner from his acts

In propria persona; spit out the bones

When once the bloody platter's licked.

Of course things experienced or overheard

Swarm up the wall and knock;

But we disperse them as they flock

And redistribute, word by silly word.

But when Totals turn up and insist

We give them way; and only then you see,

However chimerical or choice or few,

One cannot copy to unearth the new.

1966/
1966

At long last the wind has decided for itself,

Skies arch and glass panes shudder inwards,

My shutter croaks and now you tell me

It is time for those last few words. Very well.

Epoch of a whitewashed moon with

Frost in the bulb and the quailing local blood.

Very well; for not in this season will kisses

Dig any deeper into the mind to seek

The mislaid words we have been seeking,

Delegates of that place which once

The whole of suffering seemed to occupy—

O nothing really infernal, a simple darkness.

But because I came both grew abruptly

Aware of all the surrounding armies

So many faces torn from the same world,

Whole lives lost by mere inattention.

1973/
1967

America America

I see your giant image stir

O land of milk and bunny

Where the blue Algonquin flows

Where the scrapers scrape the ceiling

With that dizzy topless feeling

And everything that simply
has
to, goes!

Land of Doubleday and Dutton

Huge club sandwiches of mutton

More zip-fastener than button

Where the blue Algonquin flows

Home of musical and mayhem

Robert Frost and Billy Graham

Where you drain their brains but pay 'em

Then with dry Martinis slay 'em

Everyone that drinks 'em knows.

America America

Terra
un
peu
hysterica

For me as yet incognita

I see your giant image stir

Here no waffle lacks for honey

Avenues paved with easy money

Land of helpless idealism

Clerical evangelism

Land of prune and sometimes prism

Every kind of crazy ism

Where the blue Algonquin flows.

America America

So full of esoterica

One day I'll pierce the veils that hide

The spirit of the great divide

The sweet ambition which devours

You, super duper power of powers—

But for the nonce I send you flowers.

If there was a cake you'd take it

If I had one heart you'd break it

Where the blue Algonquin flows

Looking
forward,
looking
back

There seems nothing that you lack

America America

Pray accept this cordial greeting

On a visit far too fleeting

Rest assured I'll soon be back.

1980/
1968