So while renewing nature he relives for us
The simple things our inattention staled,
Noting sagely how water can curl like hair,
Its undisciplined recoil moving mountains
Or drumming out geysers in the earth’s crust,
Or the reflex stroke which buries ancient cities.
But water was only one of the things Leonardo
Was keen on, liked to sit down and draw.
It would not stay still; and sitting there beside
The plate of olives, the comb of stone honey,
Which seemed so eternal in the scale of values,
So philosophically immortal, he was touched
By the sense of time’s fragility, the semen of fate.
The adventitious seconds, days or seasons,
Though time stood still some drowsy afternoon,
Became for him dense, gravid with their futurity.
Life was pitiless after all, advancing and recoiling
Like the seas of the mind. The only purchase was
This, deliberately to make the time to note:
‘The earth is budged from its position by the
Merest weight of a little bird alighting on it.’
1964/1963
CONGENIES
The horizon like some keystone between soil and air
Halves out all earth in quiet distribution,
In tones of dust or biscuit, particularly kind to
Loaves of the sunburnt soil the plough turned back,
Is merciful to marls in their haphazard colours,
Blood, rust, liver, tobacco, whatnot …
So far so good; but then comes the king-vine.
Winter slew so many but the old face it out,
Dynasties of sturdy cruciform manikins, their butt
The secateur snopped back, in circumcision,
Or spreadeagled helpless on a garden wall
And left to crucify into the small green
Pilot-leaf of flame, distrustful, lame, confiding,
The horns of snails; mind you, all of this
Before the wine’s dark missile is foreseen.
And the human version matches—the stock thick.
Thighs roll to the whistle and snatch of scythes.
Bonemeal grows necks of rock and teeth like dice.
Their natural tutelary worship is the vine.
In it you can read the bloody caucus of the past,
Dour fuse of ageless feuds which smouldered out
Among these tumbled Roman walls and towers,
Either on the thorn-starred circle of the nights
Or here by day, this immensely quiet valley
Alive to the clicking of the pruners’ toil.
1966/1963
PICCADILLY
At the hub of Empire little Eros stands
Warming his testicles in chilly hands;
They dare not take him down before
They pass the anti-masturbation law.
But when at last the nation’s purity
Is one day locked in firm security,
They’ll shift the Roman exile for to be
The patron saint of our psychiatry.
1980/1963
STRIP-TEASE
Soft toys that make to seem girls
In cool whitewash with two coral
Valves of lip printing each others’ grease….
A clockwork Cupid’s bow. Increase!
Their cherry-ripe hullo brims the open purse
Of eyes washed white by the marmoreal light;
So swaying as if on pyres they go
About the buried business of the night,
Cold witches of the elementary tease
Balanced on the horn of a supposed desire….
Trees shed their leaves like some of these.
1980/1963
IN THE MARGIN
From recollection’s fund
One ikon still can move,
Grey eyes, whose graphic doubt
Smile to the last remove.
Light candles and pour out
The slim wine in the glass,
Then softly frame your lips
To blow the darkness out,
In some forgotten room
In some forgiven town
Co-evals of a wish
Made half the darkness bloom.
O timepiece shedding time
Misprisoned by the dark,
Now running like a noose
Or spilling like a gland;
At leafpace gliding on
Or catching like a spark.
Foreknowledge of the end
Calm as the night’s serene
Erasure of the light,
Two pupils of the sense
Knowing not where nor whence
Our history bleeds on.
It will not heed this wreath;
Two spendthrifts of the death
The dark bed held beneath.
1966/1964
POEMANDRES
The hand is crabbed, the manuscript much defaced,
Fly-spotted and faint even in good light.
But it is clear that in search of an absolute
Precision, he found all faces, all brows placid.
Yet beneath the enigma gnawed him like an acid …
Men and women squirted into semblances,
Their hair growing up unpruned, foliage of eagles.
He wished to touch the angelic man,
To conquer the mystical spouse, his syzygy.
A vision of the soul flashed across him
With the great harpoon buried in her!
And by the great wound set free the whole
Wheat-ear and the epoptic mystery.
The black back-bone of death,
The gold back-bone of life,
Between them spheres of self-delusion,
War to the very knife.
The poor lame scholar cried out:
‘O ineffable chrism! O horn or flask!’
The laughter rolled about, thunder in gloves.
Steadily he traced back all the copies,
The undermeanings and deposits of the actual love.
My God! The great engine of the sky.
My God! The black monitors of the Cabiri,
The chirping and squeaking of the souls like bats,
The endless plumbline of his sighs—
‘Cri d’une âme qui fait éclater
Son enveloppe charnelle. Le mal
Est plus grave que vous ne pensez’
All critics quote it as excessive now.
‘He beholding the form like to himself
Existing in her, in her Very Water,
Loved it and willed to live it;
And with the will came the Act and so at last
In the due season of the fact
He vivified naked Form devoid of Reason.’
But down there in the obvious world Laïs
Is still somehow part of the canon of loss.
The cool persuasion of the smile exists,
Her style, though a mere sheath for love.
Yet she is still giving men apples printed
With the bite of her white teeth.
1964/1964
PORTFOLIO
Late seventeenth, a timepiece rusted by dew,
Candles, a folio of sketches where rotting
I almost found you a precarious likeness—
The expert relish of the charcoal stare!
The copies, the deposits, why the very
Undermeaning and intermeaning of your mind,
Everything was there.
Your age too, its preoccupations like ours …
‘The cause of death is love though death is all’
Or else: ‘Freedom resides in choice yet choice
Is only a fatal imprisonment among the opposites.’
Who told you you were free? What can it mean?
Come, drink! The simple kodak of the hangman’s bra
in
Outstares us as it once outstared your world.
After all, we were not forced to write,
Who bade us heed the inward monitor?
And poetry, you once said, can be a deliverance
And true in many sorts of different sense,
Explicit or else like that awkward stare,
The perfect form of public reticence.
1966/1964
PRIX BLONDEL
Ah! French poet, confrere, who remaineth so
Obstinately maudit,
Inhabiting for preference some deplorable
Taudis: who between spells of aristocratic
Lassitude explores the cosmic laws
Conjugating amo et odi.
Sometimes you are ever so mildly assouvi
By some rebarbative abstract movie,
But for the most part it is le néant
Which bemuseth or the faux néant
Not to mention the fainéant:
With what careful disdain you avoid le béant,
Staying within arm’s reach of le puant
Never to affront le géant …
Yea, tonitruant you revolve in le fuyant,
So countering the critic’s cold rebuke
By getting and staying awfully chnouk.
You carry your reader’s head on the tallest pike,
Spit on kind hearts and coronets alike.
1980/1965
SUMMER
The little gold cigale
Is summer’s second god, the lovers know it,
His parched reverberating voice
Deepens the gold thirst of the noons
And follows the black sun’s long
Fig-ripening and vine-mellowing fall
So leisurely from heaven’s golden car
Day by successive day to end it all …
And where the Latin heat has stretched
The skin of valleys will his voice
Rubbing and scraping at the lover’s ear
Oracles of past suns recall,
Prodigals of leisure and brown skins,
Wine mixed with kisses and the old
Dreamless summer sleeps they once enjoyed
In Adam’s Eden long before the Fall.
1968/1965
DELPHI
Beseech the great horned toad
To turn that jewelled head,
If beckonings won’t prevail
Or voices from the dead,
Try memory’s seditious brew
And turn he must to answer you.
Honey-gold the Great Bear’s eye,
The spiral of a tripod’s smoke,
Turn he must to answer you
In time’s true-false moving quiet
All that memory dares evoke
Under a catafalque of stars
Hushed the marbles, choked the vase.
Once upon the Python spoke,
Now he lacks interpreters,
Withering in his laurelled fires
All the bitter rock inters,
From within those jewelled eyes
Tells you only what you know,
Know, but dare not realise.
1966/1965
SALAMIS
A treatise of the subtle Body,
Dark van of winter-pledging stars,
Spearheads of the advancing deep
In waters whose commotions keep
The tracery of ships’ lace spars.
Another island: another small eternity,
Many tonight must smell the thunder
Look up uneasily from yellowing books:
Is the work of art really a work of nature,
To mobilise the sense of wonder,
Revise all time’s nomenclature?
On the dark piers to paraphrase,
A blue rust dusted to tones of soots,
Plum dark the countenances move in mist
And the seaman’s iron-shod boots
On the wet quays loiter and list,
While some lost tug hoots and hoots.
A night of leavetakings and summaries,
Inventory of the capes unwinding
In their old smoke and cursing spray
In scarves of smoking suds—
Never to leave, perhaps, never to go away,
And yet past the heart’s reminding
See the soft underthrust of water sway
The spending loin come combing out
Ringlets washed back from a dead sea-king’s
Face, a helm of gold, a mask
In the autumnal water’s writhing.
To remain and realise were the hardest task.
1966/1965
TROY
By maunding and imposture Helen came,
Eater of the white fig, the sugar-bread;
Some beauty, yes, but not more than her tribe
Lathe-made for stock embraces on a bed.
I am astonished when they talk of her,
The shattered cities, bone from human bone
Torn; defaced altars and the burning hearths.
For such as she deaf impulse worked in men:
They dug up graves and ripped down scions of stone,
In act and wish unseparated then.
The test for cultures this insipid drone!
Yes, for a doll the hero, wild-eyed freak
Howled at his mother’s grave, yet stopped to dry
One tear of Helen on the sarcastic cheek.
1966/1965
IO
In the museums you can find her,
Io, the contemporary street-walker all alive
In bronze and leather, spear in hand,
Her hair packed in some slender helm
Like a tall golden hive—
A fresco of a parody of arms.
Or else on vases rushing to overwhelm
Invaders of the olive or the attic farms:
Reviving warriors, helmets full of water,
Or kneeling to swarthy foreigners,
A hostage, someone’s youngest daughter.
All the repulsion and the joy in one.
Well, all afternoon I’ve reflected on Athens,
The slim statue asleep over there,
Without unduly stressing the classical pallor
Or the emphatic disabused air
Street-girls have asleep; no,
All that will keep, all that will keep.
Soon we must be exiled to different corners
Of the sky; but the inward whiteness harms not
With dark keeping, harms not. Yet perhaps
I should sneak out and leave her here asleep?
Draw tight those arms like silver toils
The Parcae weave as their supreme award
And between deep drawn breaths release
The flying bolt of the unuttered word.
1966/1965
ONE GREY GREEK STONE
Capes hereabouts and promontories hold
Boats grazing a cyclopean eyeball,
No less astounding
Snow-tusk or toffee-round hill
In shaggy presences of rock abounding
Charm the sick disputing will.
Old dusty gems of bays go flop:
Water polishes on a sleeve to buff,
Trembles upon an eyelash into stars.
How strange our breathing does not stop.
One sovereign absence should be quite enough?
Tell me, the codes of open flowers,
Lick up the glance to pocket a whole mind.
Nothing precipitates, is left behind,
The island is all eyes. Shout!
The silence ponders, notes, and codifies.
We discover only what we set out to find.
I am at a loss to explain how writing
Turns this way this year, turns and tends—
But the line breaks off as voices do, and ends.
Image coiled in image, eye in eye,
Copying each other like gu
esses where the water
Only dares swallow up and magnify,
So precise the quiet spools
Gather, forgive, heap up, and lie.
Under such stones to sleep would be
The deepest luxury of the deliberate soul,
By day’s revivals or the plumblue fall
Of darkness bending like a hoop the whole—
Desires beyond the white capes of recall.
1966/1965
LEECHES
Yellow bottles in a barber’s door
Turn slowly as if driven by them
The softly squirming colourless mass;
Here they tell the weather by leeches.
Auxiliaries of science too, how on a thigh
Or temporal vein will settle with a sigh
As babes to breast, painless and yet perverse,
Their thirst brings health to the sick,
Impervious to all things but common salt
The ordinary cattle love to lick:
One pinch of that and the creatures die.
Bent like old harpoons
The seamen stoop to bowls, each old
Patched wineskin of the belly sags,
Capricious and indifferent fortune’s tolls,
But the old one there who always brags
Will turn to yellow bottles for his lore,
Consult to see though clouds in coma lie
Black on the harbour where men sleep
If he dare snatch his passage from the deep.
1966/1965
GEISHAS
All airs and graces, their prevailing wind
Blows through the tapestry to stiffen
The fading girls, complexions of tea-roses,
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 22