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Collected Poems 1931-74

Page 7

by Lawrence Durrell


  You will guess more easily what we have to follow.

  Death and sex are symbols of division in chaos.

  Life lies on the Whole, along a circumference pure.

  Duality is distress, like the image of pins in mirrors.

  The first law of optics is the eye: and the first law

  Of Life is Time, the endless tepid all-consuming ray.

  Consider the magic of your wife or your daughter’s

  Love, so partial a gift, defenceless against iron.

  Why is this? Because the receiver is partial not whole.

  Imperfect of reception, you are a ventriloquist’s idiot,

  Acting and speaking by inherited voices and vices.

  Now what is dumber than the voice of the dummy?

  What more deadly than the voice of Esau in Jacob?

  I will provide a text for your refreshment here:

  Let it come like a foreign grace between the food

  And the tongue, between the lip and the next glass.

  It is: nothing can save you, because salvation

  Is in what is lost, not saved: what is spent unmeasured.

  Think, even as you sit here blessing you are cursed.

  As you turn in your minds to escape you are damned.

  The detention is ended, Ladies

  And gentlemen: or what is worse perhaps,

  Men and women: or what is worst of all

  Children: for we speak to children under the title of Man.

  Farewell.

  1980/1940

  THE PRAYER-WHEEL1

  (1939)

  Only to affirm in time

  That sequence dwells in consequence,

  The River’s quietly flowing muscle

  Turning in the hollow cup

  Will teach the human compromise.

  Sword and pen win nothing here

  Underneath the human floor:

  Loved and loving move between

  The counterpoint of universes,

  Neither less and neither more.

  The sage upon his snowy wheel

  Secure among the flight of circles

  By the calculus of prayer

  Underneath the human floor

  Founds a commune in the heart.

  Time in love’s diurnal motion,

  Suffering untold migrations,

  Islanded and garlanded,

  Deep as the ministry of fishes

  Lives by a perpetual patience.

  Teach us the already known,

  Turning in the invisible saucer

  By a perfect recreation

  Air and water mix and part.

  Reaffirm the lover’s process,

  Faith and love in flesh alloyed,

  Spring the cisterns of the heart:

  Build the house of entertainment

  On the cold circumference

  Candle-pointed in the Void.

  Cross the threshold of the circle

  Turning in its mesmerism

  On the fulcrum of the Breath:

  Learn the lovely mannerism

  Of a perfect art-in-death.

  Think: two amateurs in Eden,

  Spaces in the voiceless garden,

  Ancestors whose haunted faces

  Met upon the apple’s bruises,

  Broke the lovely spell of pardon.

  Flower, with your pure assertion,

  Mythical and sea-born olive,

  Share the indivisible air,

  Teach the human compromise:

  From a zero, plus or minus,

  Born into the great Appearance,

  Building cities deep in gardens,

  Deeply still the law divines us

  In its timeless incoherence.

  What is known is never written.

  By the equal distribution

  He and She and It are genders,

  Sparks of carbon on the circle

  Meeting in the porch of sex.

  Faces mix and numbers mingle

  Many aspects of the One

  Teach the human compromise.

  Speech will never stain the blue,

  Nor the lover’s occult kisses

  Hold the curves of Paradise.

  The voices have their dying fall.

  The fingers resting on the heart,

  The dumb petitions in the churchyard

  Under the European sword

  Spell out our tribal suicide.

  Grass is green but goes to smoke:

  You, my friend, and you, and you,

  Breathe on the divining crystal,

  Cut down History, the oak:

  Prepare us for the sword and pistol.

  1948/1940

  1 Originally published as ‘Poem in Space and Time’.

  GREEN MAN

  Four small nouns I put to pasture,

  Lambs of cloud on a green paper.

  My love leans like a beadle at her book,

  Her smile washes the seven cities.

  I am the spring’s greenest publicity,

  And my poem is all wrist and elbow.

  O I am not daedal and need wings,

  My oracle kisses a black wand.

  One great verb I dip in ink

  For the tortoise who carries the earth:

  A grammar of fate like the map of China,

  Or as wrinkles sit in the palm of a girl.

  I enter my poem like a son’s house.

  The ancient thought is: nothing will change.

  But the nouns are back in the bottle,

  I ache and she is warm, was warm, is warm.

  1960/1940

  IN CRISIS

  For Nancy

  (1939)

  My love on Wednesday letting fall her body

  From upright walking won by weariness,

  As on a bed of flesh by ounces counted out,

  Softer than snuff or snow came where my body was.

  So in the aboriginal waterways of the mind,

  No word being spoken by a familiar girl,

  One may have a clear apprehension of ghostly matters,

  Audible, as perhaps in the sea-shell’s helix

  The Gulf Stream can rub soft music from a pebble

  Like quiet rehearsal of the words ‘Kneel down’:

  And cool on the inner corridors of the ear

  Can blow on memory and conscience like a sin.

  The inner man is surely a native of God

  And his wife a brilliant novice of nature.

  The woman walks in the dark like a lantern swung,

  A white spark blown between points of pain.

  We do not speak, embracing with the blood,

  The tolling heart marking its measures in darkness

  Like the scratch of a match or the fire-stone

  Struck to a spark in the dark by a colder one.

  So, lying close, the enchanted boy may hear

  Soon from Tokio the crass drum sounding,

  From the hero’s hearth the merry crotchet of war.

  Flame shall swallow the lady.

  Tall men shall come to cool the royal bush,

  Over the grey waters the bugler’s octaves

  Publish aloud a new resurrection of terror.

  Many will give suck at the bomb’s cold nipple.

  Empty your hearts: or fill from a purer source.

  That what is in men can weep, having eyes:

  That what is in Truth can speak from the responsible dust

  And O the rose grow in the middle of the great world.

  1943/1940

  AT CORINTH

  For V.

  (1940)

  At Corinth one has forgiven

  The recording travellers in the same past

  Who first entered this land of doors,

  Hunting a precise emotion by clues,

  Haunting a river, or a place in a book.

  Here the continuous evocations are washed

  Harder than tears and brighter,

  But less
penetrating than the touch of flesh,

  (Our fingers pressed upon eyelids of stone),

  Yet more patient, surely, watching

  To dissolve the statues and retire

  Night after night with a dissolving moon.

  The valley mist ennobles

  Lovers disarmed by negligence or weather,

  And before night the calm

  Discovers them, breathing upon the nerves,

  The scent of the exhausted lamps.

  Here stars come soft to pasture,

  And all doors lead to sleep.

  What lies beneath the turf forbids

  A footstep on the augustan stair,

  The intrusion of a style less pure,

  Seen through the camera’s lens,

  Or the quotations of visitors.

  My skill is in words only:

  To tell you, writing this letter home,

  That we, whose blood was sweetened once

  By Byron or his elders in the magic,

  Entered the circle safely, found

  No messenger for us except the smiles.

  Owls sip the wind here. Well,

  This place also was somebody’s home,

  Whipped by the gulf to thorns,

  A house for proverbs by a broken well.

  Winter was never native here: nor is.

  Men, women, and the nightingales

  Are forms of Spring.

  1943/1940

  NEMEA

  (1940)

  A song in the valley of Nemea:

  Sing quiet, quite quiet here.

  Song for the brides of Argos

  Combing the swarms of golden hair:

  Quite quiet, quiet there.

  Under the rolling comb of grass,

  The sword outrusts the golden helm.

  Agamemnon under tumulus serene

  Outsmiles the jury of skeletons:

  Cool under cumulus the lion queen:

  Only the drum can celebrate,

  Only the adjective outlive them.

  A song in the valley of Nemea:

  Sing quiet, quiet, quiet here.

  Tone of the frog in the empty well,

  Drone of the bald bee on the cold skull,

  Quiet, Quiet, Quiet.

  1943/1940

  IN ARCADIA

  (1940)

  By divination came the Dorians,

  Under a punishment composed an arch.

  They invented this valley, they taught

  The rock to flow with odourless water.

  Fire and a brute art came among them.

  Rain fell, tasting of the sky.

  Trees grew, composing a grammar.

  The river, the river you see was brought down

  By force of prayer upon this fertile floor.

  Now small skills: the fingers laid upon

  The nostrils of flutes, the speech of women

  Whose tutors were the birds; who singing

  Now civilized their children with the kiss.

  Lastly, the tripod sentenced them.

  Ash closed on the surviving sons.

  The brown bee memorized here, rehearsed

  Migration from an inherited habit.

  All travellers recorded an empty zone.

  Between rocks ‘O death’, the survivors.

  O world of bushes eaten like a moon,

  Kissed by the awkward patience of the ant.

  Within a concave blue and void of space.

  Something died out by this river: but it seems

  Less than a nightingale ago.

  1943/1940

  A NOCTUARY IN ATHENS

  I

  I have tasted my quantum of misfortune,

  Have prayed before the left-handed woman;

  Now as the rain of heaven downfalling tastes of space,

  So the swimmer in the ocean of self, alone,

  Utters his journey like a manual welcome,

  Sculptures his element in search of grace.

  II

  I have sipped from the flask of resurrection,

  Have eaten the oaten cake of redemption,

  And love, sweet love, who weeps by the water-clock

  Can bring if she will the sexton and the box,

  For I wear my age as wood wears voluble leaves,

  The temporal hunger and the carnal locks.

  III

  I have buried my wife under a dolmen,

  Where others sleep as naked as the clouds,

  Where others lie and weigh their dreams by ounces,

  Where tamarisk, lentisk lean to utter sweets,

  And angels in their shining moods retire:

  Where from the wells the voice of truth pronounces.

  IV

  I have tasted my quantum of misfortune.

  In the desert, the cities of ash and feathers,

  In front of others I have spoken the vowel,

  Knelt to the curly wool, the uncut horns;

  Have carried my tribulation in a basket of wattle,

  Solitary in my penitence as the owl.

  V

  I have set my wife’s lip under the bandage,

  O pound the roses, bind the eye of the soul,

  Recite the charm of the deep and heal soon,

  For the mountains accuse, and the sky’s walls.

  Let the book of sickness be put in the embers.

  I have tasted my quantum of misfortune.

  1943/1940

  DAPHNIS AND CHLOE

  (1937)

  This boy is the good shepherd.

  He paces the impartial horizons,

  Forty days in the land of tombs,

  Waterless wilderness, seeking waterholes:

  Knows the sound of the golden eagle, knows

  The algebraic flute blue under Jupiter:

  Supine in myrtle, lamb between his knees,

  Has been a musical lion upon the midnight.

  This was the good shepherd, Daphnis,

  Time’s ante-room by the Aegean tooth,

  Curled like an umber snake above the spray,

  Mumbling arbutus among the chalk-snags,

  The Grecian molars where the green sea spins,

  Suffered a pastoral decay.

  This girl was the milk and the honey.

  Under the eaves the dark figs ripen,

  The leaves’ nine medicines, a climbing wine.

  Under the tongue the bee-sting,

  Under the breast the adder at the lung,

  Like feathered child at wing.

  Life’s honey is distilled simplicity:

  The icy crystal pendant from the rock,

  The turtle’s scorching ambush for the egg,

  The cypress and the cicada,

  And wine-dark, blue, and curious, then,

  The metaphoric sea.

  This was Chloe, the milk and honey,

  Carved in the clear geography of Time,

  The skeleton clean chiselled out in chalk,

  For our Nigerian brown to study on.

  From the disease of life, took the pure way,

  Declined into the cliffs, the European waters,

  Suffered a pastoral decay.

  1943/1941

  FANGBRAND

  A BIOGRAPHY

  For Stephan Syriotis

  (Mykonos, 1940)

  Fangbrand was here once,

  A missionary man,

  Borne down by the Oxus,

  Pursued by the lilies,

  Inhabited by the old voice of sorrows,

  In a black hat and sanitary boots.

  The island recognised him,

  Giving no welcome, lying

  Trembling among her craters:

  The blue circlets of stone,

  On a sea blotted with fictions.

  He came to the wharf with long oars.

  The Ocean’s peculiar spelling

  Haunts here, cuddled by syllables

  In caves perpendicular, a blue recitation

  Of water wa
shing the dead,

  On the pediments of the statues,

  Came the strange man, the solitary man,

  Fangbrand the unsuspecting,

  Missionary one in thick soles,

  Measuring penance by the pipkin,

  Step-brother to the gannet,

  Travelling the blue bowl of the world,

  His virtues in him rough as towels.

  His brows that bent like forests

  Over the crystal-gazing eyes;

  His brows that bent like forests,

  A silver hair played on his neck.

  He saw this rock and the seal asleep,

  With the same mineral stare.

  This place he made pastance

  For the platonic ass; in this

  Cottage by the water supported

  The duellers, the twins,

  Of argument and confusion,

  Alone in a melancholy hat.

  Those who come to this pass,

  Ask themselves always how

  A rock can become a parish,

  Pulpits whitened by the sea-birds,

  Mean more than just house, rock,

  A tree, a table and a chair.

  His window was Orion;

  At night standing upon the deep,

  His eyes smaller than commas

  Watched without regret the ships

  Passing, one light in a void,

  One pure point on the wave’s floor.

  Measured in the heart’s small flask

  The spirit’s disturbance: the one voice

 

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