1946/1946
ALEXANDRIA
To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,
Who move to their sweet undiscovered ends,
Or whom the great conspiracy deceives,
I wish these whirling autumn leaves:
Promontories splashed by the salty sea,
Groaned on in darkness by the tram
To horizons of love or good luck or more love—
As for me I now move
Through many negatives to what I am.
Here at the last cold Pharos between Greece
And all I love, the lights confide
A deeper darkness to the rubbing tide;
Doors shut, and we the living are locked inside
Between the shadows and the thoughts of peace:
And so in furnished rooms revise
The index of our lovers and our friends
From gestures possibly forgotten, but the ends
Of longings like unconnected nerves,
And in this quiet rehearsal of their acts
We dream of them and cherish them as Facts.
Now when the sea grows restless as a conscript,
Excited by fresh wind, climbs the sea-wall,
I walk by it and think about you all:
B. with his respect for the Object, and D.
Searching in sex like a great pantry for jars
Marked ‘Plum and apple’; and the small, fell
Figure of Dorian ringing like a muffin-bell—
All indeed whom war or time threw up
On this littoral and tides could not move
Were objects for my study and my love.
And then turning where the last pale
Lighthouse, like a Samson blinded, stands
And turns its huge charred orbit on the sands
I think of you—indeed mostly of you,
In whom a writer would only name and lose
The dented boy’s lip and the close
Archer’s shoulders; but here to rediscover
By tides and faults of weather, by the rain
Which washes everything, the critic and the lover.
At the doors of Africa so many towns founded
Upon a parting could become Alexandria, like
The wife of Lot—a metaphor for tears;
And the queer student in his poky hot
Tenth floor room above the harbour hears
The sirens shaking the tree of his heart,
And shuts his books, while the most
Inexpressible longings like wounds unstitched
Stir in him some girl’s unquiet ghost.
So we, learning to suffer and not condemn
Can only wish you this great pure wind
Condemned by Greece, and turning like a helm
Inland where it smokes the fires of men,
Spins weathercocks on farms or catches
The lovers at their quarrel in the sheets;
Or like a walker in the darkness might,
Knocks and disturbs the artist at his papers
Up there alone, upon the alps of night.
1946/1946
POGGIO
The rubber penis, the wig, the false breasts …
The talent for entering rooms backwards
Upon a roar of laughter, with his dumb
Pained expression, wheeling there before him
That mythological great hippo’s bum:
‘Who should it be but Poggio?’ The white face,
Comical, flat, and hairless as a cheese.
Nose like a member: something worn:
A Tuscan fig, a leather can, or else,
A phallus made of putty and slapped on.
How should you know that behind
All this the old buffoon concealed a fear—
And reasonable enough—that he might be
An artist after all? Always after this kind
Of side-splitting evening, sitting there
On a three-legged stool and writing, he
Hoped poems might form upon the paper.
But no. Dirty stories. The actress and the bishop.
The ape and the eunuch. This crapula clung
To him for many years between his dinners …
He sweated at them like a ham unhung.
And like the rest of us hoped for
The transfigured story or the mantic line
Of poetry free from this mortuary smell.
For years slept badly—who does not?
Took bribes, and drugs, ate far too much and dreamed.
Married unwisely, yes, but died quite well.
1946/1946
BLIND HOMER
A winter night again, and the moon
Loosely inks in the marbles and retires.
The six pines whistle and stretch and there,
Eastward the loaded brush of morning pauses
Where the few Grecian stars sink and revive
Each night in glittering baths of sound.
Now to the winter each has given up
Deciduous stuff, the snakeskin and the antler,
Cast skin of poetry and the grape.
Blind Homer, the lizards still sup the heat
From the rocks, and still the spring,
Noiseless as coins on hair repeats
Her diphthong after diphthong endlessly.
Exchange a glance with one whose art
Conspires with introspection against loneliness
This February 1946, pulse normal, nerves at rest:
Heir to a like disorder, only lately grown
Much more uncertain of his gift with words,
By this plate of olives, this dry inkwell.
1948/1946
FABRE
The ants that passed
Over the back of his hand,
The cries of welcome, the tribes, the tribes!
Happier men would have studied
Children, more baffling than pupae,
Their conversation when alone, their voices,
The dream at the tea-table or at geography:
The sense of intimacy when moving in lines
Like caterpillars entering a cathedral.
He refused to examine the world except
Through the stoutest glasses;
A finger of ground covered with pioneers.
A continent on a bay-leaf moving.
If real women were like moths he didn’t notice.
There was not a looking-glass in the whole house.
Ah! but one day he might dress
In this black discarded business suit,
Fly heavily out on to the lawn at Arles.
What friendships lay among the flowers!
If he could be a commuter among the bees,
This pollen-hunter of the exact observation!
1946/1946
CITIES, PLAINS AND PEOPLE
(Beirut 1943)
I
Once in idleness was my beginning,
Night was to the mortal boy
Innocent of surface like a new mind
Upon whose edges once he walked
In idleness, in perfect idleness.
O world of little mirrors in the light.
The sun’s rough wick for everybody’s day:
Saw the Himalayas like lambs there
Stir their huge joints and lay
Against his innocent thigh a stony thigh.
Combs of wind drew through this grass
To bushes and pure lakes
On this tasteless wind
Went leopards, feathers fell or flew:
Yet all went north with the prayer-wheel,
By the road, the quotation of nightingales.
Quick of sympathy with springs
Where the stone gushed water
Women made their water like thieves.
Caravans paused here to drink Tibet.
On draughty corridors to Lhasa
Was my first school
In faces lifted from saddles to the snows:
Words caught by the soft klaxons crying
Down to the plains and settled cities.
So once in idleness was my beginning.
Little known of better then or worse
But in the lens of this great patience
Sex was small,
Death was small,
Were qualities held in a deathless essence,
Yet subjects of the wheel, burned clear
And immortal to my seventh year.
To all who turn and start descending
The long sad river of their growth:
The tidebound, tepid, causeless
Continuum of terrors in the spirit,
I give you here unending
In idleness an innocent beginning
Until your pain become a literature.
II
Nine marches to Lhasa.
Kùrseong: India The Nepalese ayah Kasim
Those who went forward
Into this honeycomb of silence often
Gained the whole world: but often lost each other.
In the complexion of this country tears
Found no harbour in the breast of rock.
Death marched beside the living as a friend
With no sad punctuation by the clock.
But he for whom steel and running water
Were roads, went westward only
To the prudish cliffs and the sad green home
Of Pudding Island o’er the Victorian foam.
Here all as poets were pariahs.
Some sharpened little follies into hooks
To pick upon the language and survive.
Some in search could only found
Pulpits of smoke like Blake’s Jerusalem.
For this person it was never landfall,
With so many representative young men
And all the old being obvious in feeling,
But like good crafty men
He saw the business witches in their bowlers,
The blackened Samsons of the green estate,
The earls from their cockney-boxes calling,
And knew before it was too late, London
Could only be a promise-giving kingdom.
Yet here was a window
Into the great sick-room, Europe,
With its dull set-books,
The Cartesian imperatives, Dante and Homer,
To impress the lame and awkward newcomer.
‘In Rimbaud the sense of guilt was atrophied, not conquered’ Henry Miller
Here he saw Bede who softly
Blew out desire and went to bed,
So much greater than so many less
Who made their unconquered guilt in atrophy
A passport to the dead.
Here St. Augustine took the holy cue
Of bells in an English valley; and mad Jerome
Made of his longing half a home from home.
Scythes here faithfully mark
In their supple practice paths
For the lucky and unambitious owners.
But not a world as yet. Not a world.
Death like autumn falls
On the lakes its sudden forms, on walls
Where everything is made more marginal
By the ruling planes of the snow;
Reflect how Prospero was born to a green cell
While those who noted the weather-vane
In Beatrice’s shadow sang
With the dying Emily: ‘We shall never
Return, never be young again’.
The defeat of purpose in days and lichens.
Some here unexpectedly put on the citizen,
Go walking to a church
By landscape rubbed in rain to grey
As wool on glass,
Thinking of spring which never comes to stay.
(The potential passion hidden, Wordsworth
In the desiccated bodies of postmistresses.
The scarlet splash of campion, Keats.
Ignorant suffering that closes like a lock.)
So here at last we did outgrow ourselves.
As the green stalk is taken from the earth,
With a great juicy sob, I turned him from a Man
To Mandrake, in Whose awful hand I am.
III
Prospero upon his island
Cast in a romantic form,
When his love was fully grown
He laid his magic down.
Truth within the tribal wells,
Innocent inviting creature
Does not rise to human spells
But by paradox
Teaches all who seek for her
That no saint or seer unlocks
The wells of truth unless he first
Conquer for the truth his thirst.
IV
So one fine year to where the roads
Dividing Europe meet in Paris.
Paris H.V.M. Anaïs Nancy Teresa
The gnome was here and the small
Unacted temptations. Tessa was here whose dark
Quickened hair had brushed back rivers,
Trembling with stars by Buda,
In whose inconstant arms he waited
For black-hearted Descartes to seek him out
With all his sterile apparatus.
Now man for him became a thinking lobe,
Through endless permutations sought repose.
To the hard frame of prose the cogent verb.
To many luck may give for merit
More profitable teachers. To the heart
A critic and a nymph:
And an unflinching doctor to the spirit.
All these he confined in metaphors,
She sleeping in his awkward mind
Taught of the pace of women or birds
Through the leafy body of man
Enduring like the mammoth, like speech
From the dry clicking of the greater apes
To these hot moments in a reference of stars
Beauty and death, how sex became
A lesser sort of speech, and the members doors.
V
Faces may settle sadly
Each into its private death
By business travel or fortune,
Like the fat congealing on a plate
Or the fogged negative of labour
Whose dumb fastidious rectitude
Brings death in living as a sort of mate.
‘All bearings are true’.
The Admiralty Pilot
Here however man might botch his way
To God via Valéry, Gide or Rabelais.
All rules obtain upon the pilot’s plan
So long as man, not manners, makyth man.
Some like the great Victorians of the past
Through old Moll Flanders sailed before the mast,
While savage Chatterleys of the new romance
Get carried off in Sex, the ambulance.
All rules obtain upon the pilot’s chart
If governed by the scripture of the heart.
VI
Now November visiting with rain
Surprises and humbles with its taste of elsewhere,
Licks in the draughty galleries there,
Like a country member quickened by a province,
Turning over books and leaves in haste,
Takes at last her slow stains of waste
Down the stone stairs into the rivers.
And in the personal heart, weary
Of the piercing innocents in parks
Who sail the rapt subconscious there like swans,
Disturbs and brightens with her tears, thinking:
‘Perhaps after all it is we who are blind,
While the unconscious eaters of the apple
Are whole as ingots of a process
Punched in matter by the promiscuous Mind.’
VII
By the waters of Buda
We surrendered arms, hearts, hands,
Lips for counting of kisses,
Fingers for money or touch,
Eyes for the hourglass sands.
Uncut and unloosened
Swift hair by the waters of Buda
In the shabby balcony rooms
Where the pulses waken and wonder
The churches bluff one as heart-beats
On the river their dull boom booms.
By the waters of Buda
Uncomb and unlock then,
Abandon and nevermore cherish
Queer lips, queer heart, hands.
There to futurity leave
The luckier lover who’s waiting,
As, like a spring coiled up,
In the bones of Adam, lay Eve.
VIII
Corfu:
Greece
So Time, the lovely and mysterious
With promises and blessings moves
Through her swift degrees,
So gladly does he bear
Towards the sad perfect wife,
The rocky island and the cypress-trees.
Taken in the pattern of all solitaries,
An only child, of introspection got,
Her only playmates, lovers, in herself.
Nets were too coarse to hold her
Where the nymph broke through
And only the encircling arms of pleasure held.
Here for the five lean dogs of sense
Greece moved in calm memorial
Through her own unruffled blue,