Collected Poems 1931-74

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Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 26

by Lawrence Durrell


  SIXTIES

  The year his heart wore out—

  It was not you nor you

  Distributing the weight

  Of benefits of doubt.

  A surgeon season came

  And singled loving out.

  A power-cut in a vein

  To abruptly caption stone,

  And echoing in the mind

  Some mindless telephone.

  Prophets of discontent,

  Impenetrable shades

  It was not you nor you

  Nor something left unsaid

  To elaborate the night,

  But a corn-sifting wind

  Was never far behind.

  Be steadfast where you are

  Now, in the sibyllic mind,

  His one companionable star.

  It was not you nor you

  The year his heart wore out

  But cryptic as a breath

  One crystal changed its hue;

  Thus words in music drown,

  Comparisons are few,

  Nor will we ever know,

  Tellurian loveliness,

  Which way the fearless waters flow

  That softly fathom you.

  1973/1971

  AVIS

  How elapsing our women

  Bought with lullaby money

  To fill with moon-fluids,

  To goad quench and drench with

  Quicksilver of druids

  Each nonpareil wench.

  How spicy their blood is

  How tiny their hands

  They were netted like quail

  In faraway lands.

  Come, pretty little ogre

  With the fang in your lip

  Lest time in its turnings

  Should give us the slip.

  1973/1971

  ONE PLACE

  Commission silence for a line or two,

  These walls, these trees—time out of mind

  Are temples to perfection lightly spent,

  Sunbribed and apt in their shadowy stresses,

  Where the planes hang heads, lies

  Something the mind caresses;

  And then—hardly noticed at noon

  Bells bowling, the sistrum bonged

  From steeples half asleep in bugle water.

  (This part to be whispered only.)

  To go or stay is really not the question;

  Nor even to go forever, one can’t allow here

  Death as a page its full relapse.

  In such a nook it would always be perhaps,

  Dying with no strings attached—who could do that?

  1973/1971

  REVENANTS

  Supposing once the dead were to combine

  Against us with a disciplined hysteria.

  Particular ghosts might then trouble

  With professional horrors like

  Corpses in evening dress,

  Photoglyphs from some ancient calendar

  Pictographs of lost time.

  The smile frail as a toy night-light

  Beside a sleeping infant’s bed.

  The pallor would be unfeigned,

  The child smile in its sleep.

  To see them always in memory

  Descending a spiral staircase slowly

  With that peculiar fond regard

  Or else out in silent gardens

  Under stone walls, a snapped fountain,

  Wild violets there uncaring

  Wild cyclamen uncurling

  In silence, in loaf-leisure.

  Or a last specialised picture

  Flickering on the retina perhaps

  The suave magnificence of a late

  Moon, trying not to insist too much.

  Emotions are just pampered mirrors,

  Thriftless provinces, penurious settlers.

  How to involve all nature in every breath?

  1973/1971

  THE LAND

  The rapt moonwalkers or mere students

  Of the world-envelope are piercing

  Into the earth’s crust to punctuate

  Soils and waters with cherished trees

  Or cobble with vines, they know it;

  Yet have never elaborated a philosophy

  Of finite time. I wonder why? Those

  Who watch late over the lambs, whom sleep

  Deserts because there’s thunder in the air.

  Just before dawn the whole of nature

  Growls in a darkness of impatience.

  The season-watchers just march on

  Inventing pruning-hooks, winnowing fans

  Or odd manual extensions like the spade

  Inside the uniform flow of the equinoxes

  Not puzzled any more, having forgotten

  How brief and how precarious life was,

  But finding it chiefly true yet various,

  With no uncritical submission to the Gods.

  1973/1971

  JOSS

  Perfume of old bones,

  Indian bones distilled

  In these slender batons;

  A whiff of brown saints,

  An Indian childhood. Joss.

  More mysterious than the opaque

  Knuckles of frankincense

  The orthodox keep to swamp

  Their Easter ikons with today.

  The images repeat repent repent (da capo)

  A second childhood, born again in Greece.

  O the benign power, the providing power

  Is here too with its reassurance honey.

  After the heartbreak of the long voyage,

  Same lexicon, stars over the water.

  Hello there! Demon of sadness,

  You with the coat of many colours,

  The necklace of cannibals’ teeth.

  You with the extravagant arch

  To your instep, a woman walking alone

  In the reign of her forgiveness

  In the rain.

  Moi, qui ai toujours guetté le sublime

  Me voici de nouveau dans le pétrin,

  Hunting the seven keys to human stress,

  The search always one minute old,

  A single word to transcend all others,

  A single name buried excalibur in a stone.

  1973/1971

  AVIGNON

  Come, meet me in some dead café—

  A puff of cognac or a sip of smoke

  Will grant a more prolific light,

  Say there is nothing to revoke.

  A veteran with no arm will press

  A phantom sorrow in his sleeve;

  The aching stump may well insist

  On memories it can’t relieve.

  Late cats, the city’s thumbscrews twist.

  Night falls in its profuse derision,

  Brings candle-power to younger lives,

  Cancels in me the primal vision.

  Come, random with me in the rain,

  In ghastly harness like a dream,

  In rainwashed streets of saddened dark

  Where nothing moves that does not seem.

  1973/1971

  INCOGNITO

  Outside us smoulder the great

  World issues about which nothing

  Can be done, at least by us two;

  Inside, the smaller area of a life

  Entrusted to us, as yet unendowed

  Even by a plan for worship. Well,

  If thrift should make her worldly

  Remind her that time is boundless,

  And for call-girls like business-men, money.

  Redeem pleasure, then, with a proximate

  Love—the other problems, like the ruins

  Of man’s estate, death of all goodness,

  Lie entombed with me here in this

  Oldfashioned but convincing death-bed.

  Her darkness, her eye are both typical

  Of a region long since plunged into

  Historic ruin; yet disinherited, she doesn’t care

  Being
perfect both as person and as thing.

  All winter now I shall lie suffocating

  Under the débris of this thought.

  1973/1971

  SWIMMERS

  Huit heurs … honte heurs … supper will be cold.

  Sex no substitute for

  Science no worship for …

  At night seeing lights and crouching

  Figures round the swimming pool, rapt.

  They were fishing for her pearls,

  Her necklace had broken while she swam.

  ‘Darling, I bust my pearls.’

  But all the time I was away

  In sweet and headlong Greece I tried

  To write you only the syntax failed,

  Each noun became a nascent verb

  And all verbs dormant adjectives,

  Everything sleeping among the scattered pearls.

  Corpses with the marvellous

  Property of withoutness

  Reign in the whole abundance of the breath.

  Each mood has its breathing, so does death.

  Soft they sleep and corpsely wise

  Scattered the pearls that were their eyes.

  Newly mated man and wine

  In each other’s deaths combine.

  Somebody meets everything

  While poems in their cages sing.

  1973/1971

  BLUE

  Your ship will be leaving Penang

  For Lisbon on the fourteenth,

  When I have started pointedly

  Living with somebody else.

  Yet I can successfully imagine a

  Star-crossed circumference of water

  Providing a destiny for travellers—

  Thoughts neither to pilfer nor squander

  During the postcard-troubled nights.

  How stable the feeling of being lost grows!

  The ocean of memory is ample too,

  It wheels about as you crawl over the surface

  Of the globe, having cabled away a stormy wish.

  Our judgement, our control were beyond all praise.

  So prescient were we, it must prove something.

  Madam, I presume upon somewhere to continue

  Existing round you, say the Indian Ocean

  Where life might be fuller of

  Such rich machinery that you mightn’t flinch;

  And how marvellous to be followed

  Round the world by a feeling of utter

  Sufficiency, tinged a little, I don’t doubt,

  With self-righteousness, a calming emotion!

  I too have been much diminished by wanting;

  Now limit my vision to a sufficient loveliness,

  To abdicate? But it was never our case,

  Though somewhere I feel creep in

  The word you said you hated most: ‘Nevertheless’.

  Well, say it under whatever hostile stars you roam,

  Embrace the blue vertigo of the old wish.

  And if it gets too much for me

  I can always do the other thing, remember?

  1973/1971

  MISTRAL

  At four the dawn mistral usually

  A sleep-walking giant sways and crackles

  The house, a vessel big with sail.

  One head full of poems, cruiser of light,

  Cracks open the pomegranate to reveal

  The lining of all today’s perhapses.

  Far away in her carnal fealty sleeps

  La Môme in her tiny chambre de bonne.

  ‘Le vent se lève … Il faut tenter de vivre.’

  I have grave thoughts about nothingness,

  Hold no copyright in Jesus like that girl.

  An autopsy would fuse the wires of pleading.

  It is simply not possible to thank life.

  The universe seems a huge hug without arms.

  In foul rapture dawn breaks on grey olives.

  Poetry among other afflictions

  Is the purest selfishness.

  I am making her a small scarlet jazz

  For the cellar where they dance

  To a wheezy accordion, with a one-eyed man.

  Written to a cheeky begging voice.

  Moi je suis

  Annie Verneuil

  Dit Annie La Môme

  Parfois je fais la vie

  Parfois je chome

  Premier Prix de Saloperie

  De Paris à Rome

  Annie La Môme

  Fléau du flic le soir

  Sur La Place Vendôme,

  Annie Verneuil

  Annie La Môme

  Freedom is choice: choice bondage.

  Where will I next be when the mistral

  Rises in sullen trumpets on the hills of bone?

  1973/1971

  ENVOI

  Be silent, old frog.

  Let God compound the issue as he must,

  And dog eat dog

  Unto the final desecration of man’s dust.

  The just will be devoured by the unjust.

  1973/1971

  LAST HEARD OF

  The big rivers are through with me, I guess;

  Can’t walk by Thames any more

  But the inexpressible sadness settles

  Like soft soot on dusk, becoming one whole thing,

  Matchless as twilight and as featureless.

  Yes, the big rivers are through with me, I guess;

  Nor the mind-propelling, youth-devouring ones

  Like Nile or Seine, or black Brahmaputra

  Where I was born and never went back again

  To stars printed in shining tar.

  Yes, the big rivers, except the one of sorrows

  Which winds to forts of calm where dust rebukes

  The vagaries of minds in silent poses.

  I have been washed up here or there,

  A somewhere soon becoming an empty everywhere.

  My memory of memories goes far astray,

  Was it today, or was it yesterday?

  I am thinking of things I would rather avoid

  Alone in furnished rooms

  Listening for those nymphs I’ve always waited for,

  So silent, sitting upright, looking so unowned

  And working my destiny on their marble looms.

  1973/1971

  SEFERIS

  Time quietly compiling us like sheaves

  Turns round one day, beckons the special few,

  With one bird singing somewhere in the leaves,

  Someone like K. or somebody like you,

  Free-falling target for the envious thrust,

  So tilting into darkness go we must.

  Thus the fading writer signing off

  Sees in the vast perspectives of dispersal

  His words float off like tiny seeds,

  Wind-borne or bird-distributed notes,

  To the very end of loves without rehearsal,

  The stinging image riper than his deeds.

  Yours must have set out like ancient

  Colonists, from Delos or from Rhodes,

  To dare the sun-gods, found great entrepôts,

  Naples or Rio, far from man’s known abodes,

  To confer the quaint Grecian script on other men;

  A new Greek fire ignited by your pen.

  How marvellous to have done it and then left

  It in the lost property office of the loving mind,

  The secret whisper those who listen find.

  You show us all the way the great ones went,

  In silences becalmed, so well they knew

  That even to die is somehow to invent.

  1973/1972

  VEGA

  A thirst for green, because too long deprived

  Of water in the stone garrigues, is natural,

  Accumulates and then at last gets sated

  By this lake which parodies a new life

  With a boat outside the window, breathing:

  Negative of a greater thirst no doubt,<
br />
  Lying on slopes of water just multiplying

  In green verdure, distributed at night

  All on a dark floor, the sincere flavour of stars …

  This we called Vega, a sly map-reference

  Coded in telegrams the censored name to

  ‘Vega next tenth of May. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ ‘Okay.’ You came.

  The little train which joined then severed us

  Clears Domodossola at night, doodles a way,

  Tingling a single elementary bell,

  Powdered with sequins of new snow,

  To shamble at midnight into Stresa’s blue.

  One passenger only, a woman. You.

  The fixed star of the ancients was another Vega,

  A candle burning high in the alps of heaven,

  Shielded by rosy fingers on some sill

  Above some darkly sifted lake. They also knew

  This silence trying to perfect itself in words.

  Ah! The beautiful sail so unerringly on towards death

  Once they experience the pith of this peerless calm.

  1973/1972

  POEM FOR KATHARINE FALLEY BENNETT’S BIRTHDAY

  Katharine, Queen Eleanor’s shadow hovers over you

  And your birthdays must take a little from her history:

  Be like her, both wise and gay

  And keep the little touch of tragedy

  Like swords of the soul.

  1980/1972

  VAUMORT

  For ‘Buttons’

  Seemingly upended in the sky,

 

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