Collected Poems 1931-74

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Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 23

by Lawrence Durrell


  With pets upon provincial laps

  And hair combed back against the grain

  In innocent professional poses

  Sit centred, watching time elapse.

  Scented abundance of black hair built back

  In studied rolls of merchandise to loom

  Over strangers’ visitations: ladies of pleasure.

  Their musical instruments are laid aside,

  O lethargy of educated leisure

  That palls and yawns between these silken walls.

  But one, luckier or younger, stands apart

  On a far bridge to enjoy a private wish,

  Casting the aquiline fishing-rod of gold

  Angles for other kinds of fish.

  1980/1965

  THE IKONS

  They have taken another road,

  Dionysus and all his cockledom,

  The ogres in dry river beds

  Hair flying, breast-bone full of eyes.

  A madman walks alone in the dark wood

  Swinging a lantern; nobodies march,

  Lute-player, card-sharper, politician,

  Until here lastly the condign

  Majestic stance of something else

  Apparelled for death: Byzantium.

  The eyes won’t change, no, but the

  Going forward or going back

  Can be read off as on a clock-face.

  Here the population of clocks multiplied,

  They bore the suffocating fruits of chime, hours.

  All day long the belfries reminded

  All night the prayers besieged.

  A cross rose, wish-bone of the defeated,

  The chicken-souled, the guilty.

  It has got worse since, of course,

  And can hardly get any better now.

  A café is the last Museum and best,

  To observe a great man in the middle

  Of a collapse; but parts work still,

  The crutches are incidental, adding variety.

  Some injudicious pleasures will remain,

  The sexual phosphorescence of youth is gone,

  But here on naptha-scented evenings still

  He sits before the tulip of old wine,

  In a red fez, by some sunken garden,

  Watching for shooting-stars.

  1966/1966

  APTEROS

  Sky star-engraved, the Pleiads up,

  Autumn’s old ikonography

  In falling fruit and turning sea,

  The whole spins in a drinking-cup.

  Incised the crater of heaven burns

  Recovering all she gave,

  Into the cooling ground returns

  Fruit, star and promiscuous wave,

  To die by the universal variable

  And scribble on a stone our scope,

  The phosphorescence of desire

  To a season of wanhope.

  Kiss of white caryatids which lean

  With broken boxers’ noses here

  On armatures of lead,

  Year after summer year incline

  To appear and re-appear.

  How much will time exempt in us

  How much replace?

  Shapes of the carnal void,

  Cracked smile of marble mouth,

  Starred emblem of a stone embrace.

  1966/1966

  KEEPSAKE

  To increase your hold

  Relax your grip,

  Exploit the slip twixt

  Cup and lip.

  Enjoy and bid and let it grow,

  Superior sense of vertigo,

  The adepts’ sixth infernal sense

  Spells passionate indifference,

  So by the racing pulse express

  A discipline of laziness.

  To increase your scope

  Relax your hold

  Not wish nor hope

  One second old

  The key to open all the locks

  Of this insidious paradox,

  Not wish nor hope one second old

  So all that glitters may be gold.

  1966/1966

  CAPE DRASTI

  Who told you you were it,

  Acrobat without arms,

  Ringmaster of the choice whiplash,

  Opening and shutting drawers

  In long apathies or pedantic calms,

  Or barking all night at cliffs

  Too high to remember how to climb?

  Skippers have other names for you,

  Who mark you only by fathom,

  But to me a blue specie somehow,

  In the nostril of a westerly,

  Or T-bone under night spars

  Out of some slangy mood disperses,

  Carves out a beach in cripples.

  Come March and you’ll sharpen minds,

  Ropes all chewn out, sheets purged,

  Or splitting down the middle race

  To bang boats together like heads.

  No, lion-paw, ape of every mood,

  Steeplejack of the tilted breakers,

  How nice land feels to watch you go by on.

  1966/1966

  NORTH WEST

  The dying business began hereabouts,

  A pewter plain, a shrubless frugality,

  An anarch sea, cliffs, nothing.

  It promised a local action merely

  But the death-rot somehow spread from

  Limb to limb and mind to mind,

  Became endemic. The body politic

  Was touched, began to suppurate once more.

  An empire began to have dizzy spells,

  One fever to cast out another

  One man to cast down another.

  Who can apportion a historic fault?

  A few hundred years of average misery,

  A thousand more of abstract villainy,

  The precious culture pilfered into dust.

  They spoke of starting again at the beginning

  But by then few had looked upon it fresh,

  And the frenzied young were building away

  From it, towards some tributary death.

  A little contempt goes a long way,

  Smashed well-head with gorgons

  Clothed now with self-renewing moss.

  1966/1966

  THE INITIATION

  Spoonful of wine, candle-stump and eyes.

  The cuckold-mixture as before;

  Nothing time so approves

  In each superb disguise,

  The patents of the wish,

  Sweet but deluding law,

  The infinities which must discern

  A fever’s point of no return.

  Or a child’s voice which calls

  Behind tall garden walls,

  Calls, and falls silent in despair,

  He or she will never be there,

  Where images still swarm

  And pour from the broken hives

  Never to recover the obedient smiles

  Nor mend disfigured lives.

  Here at this candid hour

  By one unfaltering gleam

  Remembering it as it glows

  The fever’s auguries

  Till the dismantled dream

  Where all the ancient loyalties foreclose.

  The road leads softly down

  On avenues of darkling recognition,

  Compass or sextant none

  Towards death’s suave audition.

  So, harking back to it, spoonful

  Candle-stump and eyes one sees

  In their majority,

  With razors whispering on the lard

  What fruit the barbers shave

  To the last dimple of the self-regard.

  1966/1966

  ACROPOLIS

  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

  PERSUASIONS

  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

  MOONLIGHT

  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

  BLOOD-COUNT

  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

  KASYAPA

  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

  VIDOURLE

  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

  PAULLUS TO CORNELIA1

  I

  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,

&
nbsp; 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.

  II

  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

  1 See the eleventh elegy of Propertius.

  PRESS INTERVIEW

  Capacities in doubt and lovers failing?

  We feel time freshen but we keep on sailing.

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

 

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