1960/1955
BALLAD OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Extracts from a Case-Book
MONDAY
She dreams she is chased by a black buck-nigger
But a fall in the coal-face blocks out the dream,
Something as long and lank as a lanyard,
Slow as a glacier, cold as cold cream—
Something inside her starts to scream …
TUESDAY
Dreams she is chased by a man in a nightshirt,
Lawrence of Arabia dressed in a sheet:
Then locked by the crew of a Liberty Ship
With rows and rows and rows of refrigerated meat
While the voices keep repeating ‘Eat’.
WEDNESDAY
Dreams she is handcuffed to a dancing-partner
And dragged round a roller-skating rink.
She swallows the ring on her wedding-finger
Falls through the ice but doesn’t seem to sink
Though her party clothes begin to shrink.
THURSDAY
Dreams she is queen of a mountain of cork,
Too hot to sit on, too cold to wear,
Naked, she pricks with a toasting-fork
A statue of Venus reclining there
With a notice saying: No charge for wear and tear.
FRIDAY
She dreams she’s a dog-team tugging poor Scott,
Sheer to the confines of the Pole:
Suddenly the Arctic becomes a-burning hot,
And when they arrive it’s just an empty hole,
A geyser whistling in a mountain of coal.
SATURDAY
Dreams she’s the queen of a city-culture
Lovely as Helen but doomed to spoil:
Under her thighs roll the capital rivers,
The Rhine and the Volga flowing like oil.
Hamlet offers her a buttoned foil.
SUNDAY
What has she got that we haven’t got?
Isn’t she happy and lovely too?
She dreams that her husband a bank-director
Locked in the Monkey-House at the Zoo—
Here’s the clinical picture but what can we do?
1956/1955
AT THE LONG BAR
Bowed like a foetus at the long bar sit,
You common artist whose uncommon ends
Deflower the secret contours of a mind
And all around you pitying find
Like severed veins your earthly friends …
(The sickness of the oyster is the pearl)
Dead bottles all around infect
Stale air the exploding corks bewitch—
O member of this outlawed sect,
Only the intolerable itch,
Skirt-fever, keeps the anthropoid erect.
Husband or wife or child condemn
This chain-gang which we all inherit:
Or those bleak ladders to despair
Miscalled high place and merit.
Dear, if these knotted words could wake
The dead boy and the buried girl …
(The sickness of the oyster is the pearl)
1956/1955
STYLE
Something like the sea,
Unlaboured momentum of water
But going somewhere,
Building and subsiding,
The busy one, the loveless.
Or the wind that slits
Forests from end to end,
Inspiriting vast audiences,
Ovations of leafy hands
Accepting, accepting.
But neither is yet
Fine enough for the line I hunt.
The dry bony blade of the
Sword-grass might suit me
Better: an assassin of polish.
Such a bite of perfect temper
As unwary fingers provoke,
Not to be felt till later,
Turning away, to notice the thread
Of blood from its unfelt stroke.
1955/1955
THASOS
To My Godson
Rupert Burrows
Indifferent history! In such a place
Can we choose what really matters most?
Three hundred oars munched up the gulf.
A tyrant fell. The wise men turned their beds
To face the East—this was war. Or else
Eating and excreting raised to the rank of arts:
Sporting the broad purple—this was peace,
For demagogues exhausted by sensations.
From covens of delight they brought
The silver lampreys served on deathless chargers
By cooks of polity and matchless tact.
Only their poets differed in being free
From the historic consciousness and its
Defeats: wise servants of the magnet and
The sieve, against this human backdrop told
The truth in oracles and never asked themselves
In what or why they never could believe.
1955/1955
A PORTRAIT OF THEODORA
I recall her by a freckle of gold
In the pupil of one eye, an odd
Strawberry-gold: and after many years
Of forgetting that musical body—
Arms too long, wrists too slender—
Remember only the unstable wishes
Disquieting the flesh. I will not
Deny her pomp was laughable, urban:
Behind it one could hear the sad
Provincial laughter rotted by insomnia.
None of these meetings are planned,
I guess, or willed by the exemplars
Of a city’s love—a city founded in
The name of love: to me is always
Brown face, white teeth, cheap summer frock
In green and white stripes and then
Forever a strawberry eye. I recalled no more
For years. The eye was lying in wait.
Then in another city from the same
Twice-used air and sheets, in the midst
Of a parting: the same dark bedroom,
Arctic chamber-pot and cruel iron bed,
I saw the street-lamp unpick Theodora
Like an old sweater, unwrinkle eyes and mouth,
Unbandaging her youth to let me see
The wounds I had not understood before.
How could I have ignored such wounds?
The bloody sweepings of a loving smile
Strewed like Osiris among the dunes?
Now only my experience recognizes her
Too late, among the other great survivors
Of the city’s rage, and places her among
The champions of love—among the true elect!
1955/1955
ASPHODELS: CHALCIDICE
‘No one will ever pick them, I think,
The ugly off-white clusters: all the grace
Lies in the name of death named.
Are they a true certificate for death?’
‘I wonder’
‘You might say that once the sages,
Death being identified, forgave it language:
Called it “asphodel”, as who should say
The synonym for scentless, colourless,
Solitary,
Rock-loving …’ ‘Memory is all of these.’
‘Yes, they asserted the discipline of memory,
Which admits of no relapse in its
Consignment, does not keep forever.’
‘Nor does death.’
‘You mean our dying?’ ‘No, but when one is
Alone, neither happy nor unhappy, in
The deepest ache of reason where this love
Becomes a malefactor, clinging so,
You surely know—’
‘Death’s stock will stand no panic,
Be beautiful in jars or on a coffin,
Exonerate the flesh when it has turned
Or mock the
enigma with an epitaph
It never earned.’
‘These quite precisely guard ironic truth,
And you may work your way through every
Modulation of the rose, to fill your jars
With pretty writing-stuff: but for death—’
‘Truly, always give us
These comfortless, convincing, even, yes,
A little mocking, Grecian asphodels.’
1955/1955
FREEDOM
O Freedom which to every man entire
Presents imagined longings to his fire,
To swans the water, bees the honey-cell,
To bats the dark, to lovers loving well,
Only to the wise may you
Restricting and confining be,
All who half-delivered from themselves
Suffer your conspiracy,
Freedom, Freedom, prison of the free.
1956/1956
NEAR PAPHOS
Her sea limps up here twice a day
And sigh by leaden sigh deposes
Crude granite hefts and sponges
Sucked smooth as foreheads or as noses;
No footprints dove the labouring sand,
For terrene clays bake smooth
But coarse as a gipsy’s hand.
A rose in an abandoned well,
The sexless babble of a spring,
A carob’s torn and rosy flesh,
A vulture sprawling on a cliff
Will tell the traveller nothing.
The double axe, the double sex,
The noble mystery of the doves,
Before men sorted out their loves
By race and gender chose
One from these dying groves.
This much the sea limps in to touch
With old confining foam-born hand
While lovers seeking nothing much
Or hunting the many through the one
May taste in its reproachful roar
The ancient relish of her sun.
1966/1956
THE OCTAGON ROOM
(1955)
Veronese grey! Here in the Octagon Room
Our light ruffles and decodes
Greys of cigar-ash or river clay
Into the textual plumage of a mind—
Paulo, all his Muses held
Quietly in emulsion up against
A pane of cockney sky.
It is not only the authority
Of godly sensual forms which pity
And overwhelm us—this grey copied
From eyes I no more see,
Recording every shade of pain, yes,
All it takes to give smiles
The deathly candour of a dying art,
Or worth to words exchanged in darkness:
Is it only the dead who have such eyes?
No, really,
I think it is the feudal calm
Of sensuality enjoyed without aversion
Or regret … (incident of the ring
Lost in the grass: her laughter).
I should have been happy
In these rainy streets, a captive still
Like all these glittering hostages
We carried out of Italy, canvases
Riding the cracking winds in great London
Parks: happy or unhappy, who can tell you?
Only Veronese grey walks backwards
In the past across my mind
To where tugs still howl and mumble
On the father river,
And the grey feet passing, quiver
On pavements greyer than his greys …
Less wounding perhaps because the belongers
Loved here, died here, and took their art
Like love, with a pinch of salt, yes
Their pain clutched in the speechless
Deathless calm of Method. Gods!
1960/1956
EVA BRAUN’S DREAM
First come the Infantry in scented bodices,
Deployed, and after them the Birdwomen,
(The Ladies Air Arm) clad in shirts of male,
And riding gravid chargers shod with spurs.
In shrill capitulation like some endless wife.
After them in rumbling families
Symbolic engines only found in Jung,
Bombs polished on the lathe like eggs,
Grey mammary tanks, forceps and hooks with eyes,
Unbuttoned panzers, huge uncircumcised artillery,
Grave in procession rustle past the stand.
‘One age, one land, one leader and one sex.’
1980/1957
THE COTTAGER
Here is a man who says: Let there be light.
Let who is dressed in hair walk upright,
The house give black smoke, the children
Be silenced by fire and apples. Let
A sedative evening bring steaming cattle
The domestic kettle, contagion of sleep,
Deeper purer surer even than Eden.
Twin tides speak making of two three
By fission by fusion, a logarithmic sea.
What was bitter in the apple is eaten deep,
Rust sleeps in the steel, canker will keep.
Let one plus one quicken and be two,
Keep silence that silence keep you.
1960/1960
NIGHT EXPRESS
Night falls. The dark expresses
Roll back their iron scissors to commence
Precision of the wheels’ elision
From whose dark serial jabber sparks
Swing swaying through the mournful capitals
And in these lighted cages sleep
With open eyes the passengers
Each committed to his private folly,
On hinges of wanhope the long
Sleeping shelves of men and women,
A library of maggots dreaming, rolls.
Some retiring to their sleeping past,
On clicking pillows feel the flickering peep
Of lighted memories, keys slipped in grooves
Parted like lips receiving or resisting kisses.
Pillars of smoke expend futurity.
This is how it is for me, for you
It must be different lying awake to hear
At a garden’s end the terrible club-foot
Crashing among iron spars, the female shrieks,
Love-song of steel and the consenting night.
To feel the mocking janitor, sleep,
Shake now and wake to lean there
On a soft elbow seeing where we race
A whiplash curving outwards to the stars,
A glowing coal to light the lamps of space.
1960/1960
MYTHOLOGY
Miss Willow, secretly known as ‘tit’ …
Plotkin who slipped on new ice
And wounded the stinks master
The winter when the ponds froze over …
Square roots of the symbol Abraham
Cut off below the burning bush,
Or in the botany classes heads
Drying between covers like rare ferns,
Stamen and pistil, we were young then.
Later with tunes like ‘Hips and Whores’
The song-book summed us up,
Mixing reality with circumstance,
With Hotchkiss cock of the walk
Top button undone, and braided cap,
He was the way and the life.
What dismays is not time
Assuaging every thirst with a surprise,
Bitterness hidden in desiring bodies,
Unfolded strictly, governed by the germ.
Plotkin cooked like a pie in iron lungs:
Glass rods the doctors dipped in burning nitrates
Dripped scalding on in private hospitals
And poor ‘tit’ Willow who had been
Young, pretty and perhaps contemptuous
Dreaming of love, was
carried to Spain in a cage.
1960/1960
CAVAFY
I like to see so much the old man’s loves,
Egregious if you like and often shabby
Protruding from the ass’s skin of verse,
For better or for worse,
The bones of poems cultured by a thirst—
Dilapidated taverns, dark eyes washed
Now in the wry and loving brilliance
Of such barbaric memories
As held them when the dyes of passion ran.
No cant about the sottishness of man!
The forest of dark eyes he mused upon,
Out of ikons, waking beside his own
In stuffy brothels, on stained mattresses,
Watched by the melting vision of the flesh;
Eros the tutor of our callowness
Deployed like ants across his ageing flesh
The crises of great art, the riders
Of love, their bloody lariats whistling,
The cries locked in the quickened breath,
The love-feast of a sort of love-in-death.
And here I find him great. Never
To attempt a masterpiece of size—
You must leave life for that. No
But always to preserve the adventive
Minute, never to destroy the truth,
Admit the coarse manipulations of the lie.
If only the brown fingers franking his love
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 20