Collected Poems 1931-74

by Lawrence Durrell

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,