The Complete Poems

  Little slender lad, lightning engendered,

  Grand master of magicians:

  When pirates stole you at Icaria

  Wild ivy gripped their rigging, every oar

  Changed to a serpent, panthers held the poop,

  A giant vine sprouted from the mast crotch

  And overboard they plunged, the whey-faced crew!

  Lead us with your song, tall Queen of earth!

  Twinned to the god, I follow comradely

  Through a first rainbow-limbo, webbed in white,

  Through chill Tyrrhenian grottoes, under water,

  Where dolphins wallow between marble rocks,

  Through sword-bright jungles, tangles of unease,

  Through halls of fear ceilinged with incubi,

  Through blazing treasure-chambers walled with garnet,

  Through domes pillared with naked Caryatids –

  Then mount at last on wings into pure air,

  Peering down with regal eye upon

  Five-fruited orchards of Elysium,

  In perfect knowledge of all knowledges.

  And still she drowsily chants

  From her invisible bower of stars.

  Gentle her voice, her notes come linked together

  In intricate golden chains paid out

  Slowly across brocaded cramoisy,

  Or unfold like leaves from the jade-green shoot

  Of a rising bush whose blossoms are her tears….

  O, whenever she pauses, my heart quails

  Until the sound renews.

  Little slender lad, little secret god,

  Pledge her your faith in me,

  Who have ambrosia eaten and yet live.

  THE UNNAMED SPELL

  Let us never name that royal certitude,

  That simultaneous recognition

  When first we stood together,

  When I saw you as a child astonished,

  Years before, under tall trees

  By a marching sound of wind:

  Your heart sown with a headlong wisdom

  Which every grief or joy thereafter

  Rooted still more strongly.

  Naming is treacherous, names divide

  Truth into lesser truths, enclosing them

  In a coffin of counters –

  Give the spell no name, liken it only

  To the more than tree luxuriating

  Seven ells above earth:

  All heal, golden surprise of a kiss,

  Wakeful glory while the grove winters,

  A branch Hell-harrowing,

  Of no discoverable parentage,

  Strangeling scion of varied stocks

  Yet true to its own leaf,

  Secret of secrets disclosed only

  To who already share it,

  Who themselves sometimes raised an arch –

  Pillared with honour; its lintel, love –

  And passed silently through.

  From Man Does, Woman Is

  (1964)

  A TIME OF WATTING

  The moment comes when my sound senses

  Warn me to keep the pot at a quiet simmer,

  Conclude no rash decisions, enter into

  No random friendships, check the runaway tongue

  And fix my mind in a close caul of doubt –

  Which is more difficult, maybe, than to face

  Night-long assaults of lurking furies.

  The pool lies almost empty; I watch it nursed

  By a thin stream. Such idle intervals

  Are from waning moon to the new – a moon always

  Holds the cords of my heart. Then patience, hands;

  Dabble your nerveless fingers in the shallows;

  A time shall come when she has need of them.

  EXPECT NOTHING

  Give, ask for nothing, hope for nothing,

  Subsist on crumbs, though scattered casually

  Not for you (she smiles) but for the birds.

  Though only a thief’s diet, it staves off

  Dire starvation, nor does she grow fat

  On the bread she crumbles, while the lonely truth

  Of love is honoured, and her word pledged.

  NO LETTER

  Be angry yourself, as well you may,

  But why with her? She is no party to

  Those avaricious dreams that pester you.

  Why knot your fists as though plotting to slay

  Even our postman George (whose only due

  Is a small Christmas box on Christmas Day)

  If his delivery does not raise the curse

  Of doubt from your impoverished universe?

  THE WHY OF THE WEATHER

  Since no one knows the why of the weather

  Or can authoritatively forecast

  More than twelve hours of day or night, at most,

  Every poor fool is licensed to explain it

  As Heaven’s considered judgement on mankind,

  And I to account for its vagaries, Myrto,

  By inklings of your unaccountable mind.

  IN TIME

  In time all undertakings are made good,

  All cruelties remedied,

  Each bond resealed more firmly than before –

  Befriend us, Time, Love’s gaunt executor!

  FIRE WALKER

  To be near her is to be near the furnace.

  Fortunate boy who could slip idly through,

  Basket in hand, culling the red-gold blossom,

  Then wander on, untaught that flowers were flame,

  With no least smell of scorching on his clothes!

  I, at a greater distance, charred to coal,

  Earn her reproach for my temerity.

  DEED OF GIFT

  After close, unembittered meditation

  She gave herself to herself, this time for good;

  Body and heart re-echoed gratitude

  For such a merciful repudiation

  Of debts claimed from them by the neighbourhood –

  Not only friends, and friends of friends, but lovers

  Whom in the circumstances few could blame

  (Her beauty having singed them like a flame)

  If they had hoarded under legal covers

  Old promissory notes signed with her name.

  And though to stand once more on the firm road

  From which by misadventure she had strayed,

  So that her journey was that much delayed,

  Justified the default of duties owed,

  What debt of true love did she leave unpaid?

  AT BEST, POETS

  Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters,

  And watchful fingers:

  We claim no magic comparable to hers –

  At best, poets; at worst, sorcerers.

  SHE IS NO LIAR

  She is no liar, yet she will wash away

  Honey from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand,

  And, dressed at dawn in clean white robes will say,

  Trusting the ignorant world to understand:

  ‘Such things no longer are; this is today.’

  A LAST POEM

  A last poem, and a very last, and yet another –

  O, when can I give over?

  Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails

  And my breath fails and I shake with fever,

  Or sit well wrapped in a many-coloured cloak

  Where the moon shines new through Castle Crystal?

  Shall I never hear her whisper softly:

  ‘But this is truth written by you only,

  And for me only; therefore, love, have done’?

  THE PEARL

  When, wounded by her anger at some trifle,

  I imitate the oyster, rounding out

  A ball of nacre about the intrusive grit,

  Why should she charge me with perversity

  As one rejoicing in his own torn guts

  Or in the lucent pearl resultant

  Which she
disdainfully strings for her neck?

  Such anger I admire; but could she swear

  That I am otherwise incorrigible?

  THE LEAP

  Forget the rest: my heart is true

  And in its waking thought of you

  Gives the same wild and sudden leap

  That jerks it from the brink of sleep.

  BANK ACCOUNT

  Never again remind me of it:

  There are no debts between us.

  Though silences, half-promises, evasions

  Curb my impatient spirit

  And freeze the regular currency of love,

  They do not weaken credit. Must I demand

  Sworn attestations of collateral,

  Forgetting how you looked when first you opened

  Our joint account at the Bank of Fate?

  JUDGEMENT OF PARIS

  What if Prince Paris, after taking thought,

  Had not adjudged the apple to Aphrodite

  But, instead, had favoured buxom Hera,

  Divine defendress of the marriage couch?

  What if Queen Helen had been left to squander

  Her beauty upon the thralls of Menelaus,

  Hector to die unhonoured in his bed,

  Penthesileia to hunt a poorer quarry,

  The bards to celebrate a meaner siege?

  Could we still have found the courage, you and I,

  To embark together for Cranaë

  And consummate our no less fateful love?

  MAN DOES, WOMAN IS

  Studiously by lamp-light I appraised

  The palm of your hand, its heart-line

  Identical with its head-line;

  And you appraised the approving frown.

  I spread my cards face-upwards on the table,

  Not challenging you for yours.

  Man does; but woman is –

  Can a gamester argue with his luck?

  THE AMPLE GARDEN

  However artfully you transformed yourself

  Into bitch, vixen, tigress,

  I knew the woman behind.

  Light as a bird now, you descend at dawn

  From the poplar bough or ivy bunch

  To peck my strawberries,

  And have need indeed of an ample garden:

  All my fruits, fountains, arbours, lawns

  In fief to your glory.

  You, most unmetaphorically you:

  Call me a Catholic, so devout in faith

  I joke of love, as Catholics do of God,

  And scorn all exegesis.

  TO MYRTO ABOUT HERSELF

  Fierce though your love of her may be,

  What man alive can doubt

  I love her more? Come now, agree

  Not to turn rivalrous of me,

  Lest you and I fall out!

  And should her law make little sense

  Even at times to you,

  Love has its own sure recompense:

  To love beyond all reason – hence

  Her fondness for us two.

  What she pursues we neither know

  Nor can we well inquire;

  But if you carelessly bestow

  A look on me she did not owe

  It comes at her desire.

  THE THREE-FACED

  Who calls her two-faced? Faces, she has three:

  The first inscrutable, for the outer world;

  The second shrouded in self-contemplation;

  The third, her face of love,

  Once for an endless moment turned on me.

  DAZZLE OF DARKNESS

  The flame guttered, flared impossibly high,

  Went out for good; yet in the dazzle of darkness

  I saw her face ashine like an angel’s:

  Beauty too memorable for lamentation,

  Though doomed to rat and maggot.

  MYRRHINA

  O, why judge Myrrhina

  As though she were a man?

  She obeys a dark wisdom

  (As Eve did before her)

  Which never can fail,

  Being bound by no pride

  Of armorial bearings

  Bequeathed in tail male.

  And though your blood brother

  Who dared to do you wrong

  In his greed of Myrrhina

  Might plead a like wisdom

  The fault to excuse,

  Myrrhina is just:

  She has hanged the poor rogue

  By the neck from her noose.

  FOOD OF THE DEAD

  Blush as you stroke the curves – chin, lips and brow –

  Of your scarred face, Prince Orpheus: for she has called it

  Beautiful, nor would she stoop to flattery.

  Yet are you patient still, when again she has eaten

  Food of the dead, seven red pomegranate seeds,

  And once more warmed the serpent at her thighs

  For a new progress through new wards of hell?

  EURYDICE

  ‘I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed’ –

  Once I utter the curse, how can she rest:

  No longer able, weeping, to placate me

  With renewed auguries of celestial beauty?

  Speak, fly in her amber ring; speak, horse of gold!

  What gift did I ever grudge her, or help withhold?

  In a mirror I watch blood trickling down the wall –

  Is it mine? Yet still I stand here, proud and tall.

  Look where she shines, with a borrowed blaze of light

  Among the cowardly, faceless, lost, unright,

  Clasping a naked imp to either breast –

  Am I not oppressed, oppressed, three times oppressed?

  She has gnawn at corpse-flesh till her breath stank,

  Paired with a jackal, grown distraught and lank,

  Crept home, accepted solace, but then again

  Flown off to chain truth back with an iron chain.

  My own dear heart, dare you so war on me

  As to strangle love in a mad perversity?

  Is ours a fate can ever be forsworn

  Though my lopped head sing to the yet unborn?

  TO BEGUILE AND BETRAY

  To beguile and betray, though pardonable in women,

  Slowly quenches the divine need-fire

  By true love kindled in them. Have you not watched

  The immanent Goddess fade from their brows

  When they make private to her mysteries

  Some whip-scarred rogue from the hulks, some painted clown

  From the pantomime – and afterwards accuse you

  Of jealous hankering for the mandalot

  Rather than horror and sick foreboding

  That she will never return to the same house?

  I WILL WRITE

  He had done for her all that a man could,

  And, some might say, more than a man should.

  Then was ever a flame so recklessly blown out

  Or a last goodbye so negligent as this?

  ‘I will write to you,’ she muttered briefly,

  Tilting her cheek for a polite kiss;

  Then walked away, nor ever turned about….

  Long letters written and mailed in her own head –

  There are no mails in a city of the dead.

  BIRD OF PARADISE

  At sunset, only to his true love,

  The bird of paradise opened wide his wings

  Displaying emerald plumage shot with gold

  Unguessed even by him.

  True, that wide crest

  Had blazoned royal estate, and the tropic flowers

  Through which he flew had shown example

  Of what brave colours gallantry might flaunt,

  But these were other. She asked herself, trembling:

  ‘What did I do to awake such glory?’

  THE METAPHOR

  The act of love seemed a dead metaphor

  For love itself, until the timeless moment

  When fing
ers trembled, heads clouded,

  And love rode everywhere, too numinous

  To be expressed or greeted calmly:

  O, then it was, deep in our own forest,

  We dared revivify the metaphor,

  Shedding the garments of this epoch

  In scorn of time’s wilful irrelevancy;

  So at last understood true nakedness

  And the long debt to silence owed.

  SECRECY

  Lovers are happy

  When favoured by chance,

  But here is blessedness

  Beyond all happiness,

  Not to be gainsaid

  By any gust of chance,

  Harvest of one vine,

  Gold from the same mine:

  To keep which sacred

  Demands a secrecy

  That the world might blame

  As deceit and shame;

  Yet to publish which

  Would make a him and her

  Out of me and you

  That were both untrue.

  Let pigeons couple

  Brazenly on the bough,

  But royal stag and hind

  Are of our own mind.

  JOSEPH AND MARY

  They turned together with a shocked surprise –

  He, old and fabulous; she, young and wise –

  Both having heard a newborn hero weep

  In convalescence from the stroke of sleep.

  AN EAST WIND

  Beware the giddy spell, ground fallen away

  Under your feet, wings not yet beating steady:

  An ignorant East Wind tempts you to deny

  Faith in the twofold glory of your being –

  You with a thousand leagues or more to fly.

  ‘Poised in air between earth and paradise,

  Paradise and earth, confess which pull

  Do you find the stronger? Is it of homesickness

  Or of passion? Would you be rather loyal or wise?

  How are these choices reconcilable?’

  Turn from him without anger. East Wind knows

  Only one wall of every foursquare house,

  Has never viewed your northern paradise