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
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 23