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
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,
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,