Collected Poems 1931-74
Page 15
Old rooks swayed in a rotten tree.
They waved: he did not answer, although he
Felt kindly to them all, for they could do
What he could not: he did not dare to pray.
His inner prohibitions were a sea
On which he floated spellbound day by day.
World and its fevers howled outside: within
The Omen and the Fret that hemmed him in,
The sense of his complete unworthiness
Pressed each year slowly tighter like a tourniquet.
1948/1947
IV
DMITRI OF CARPATHOS
Four card-players: an ikon of the saint
On a pitted table among eight hands
That cough and spit or close like manacles
On fortunate court-cards or on the bottle
Which on the pitted paintwork stands.
Among them one whose soft transpontine nose
Fuller of dirty pores pricked on a chart
Has stood akimbo on the turning world,
From Cimbalu to Smyrna shaken hands,
Tasted the depths of every hidden sound:
In wine or poppy a drunkard with a drunkard’s heart
Who never yet was known to pay his round.
Meanwhile below in harbour his rotten boat,
Beard green from winter quarters turns
Her scraggy throat to nudge the northern star,
And like a gipsy burns and burns; goes wild
Till something climbs the hill
And stands beside him at the tavern table
To pluck his drunken elbow like a child.
1948/1947
V
PANAGIOTIS OF LINDOS
Dark birds in nature redevise
Their linings every year: are not
The less like these weaving fishermen
Bent so exactly at their tattered seines
On a rotten wharf, their molten catch
Now sold and loaded: though they feather only
For fathoms of sea and the fishes within it,
Needles passing in a surf of lights.
Panagiotis has resigned it all
For an enamel can and olive shade:
His concern a tavern prospect,
Miles of sweet chestnut and borage.
This armament of wine he shares now
With the greatest philosopher, the least
Inventor, the meanest doctrine of rest,
Mixing leisure and repose like wine and water,
Tutor and pupil in the crater.
His dark sleep is bruised by each
Sink of the sun below the castle
Where the Sporades have opened
Their spokes, and the whole Aegean
In brilliant soda turns the darkening bays.
1948/1948
VI
A RHODIAN CAPTAIN
Ten speechless knuckles lie along a knee
Among their veins, gone crooked over voyages,
Made by this ancient captain. Life has now
Contracted like the pupil of an eye
To a slit in space and time for images—
All he has seen of sage and arbutus:
Touched berries where the golden eagle crashes
From its chariot of air and dumb trap:
Islands fortunate as Atlantis was …
Yet while we thought him voyaging through life
He was really here, in truth, outside the doorpost,
In the shade of the eternal vine, his wife,
With the same tin plate of olives on his lap.
1948/1947
ELEGY ON THE CLOSING OF THE FRENCH BROTHELS
For Henry Miller and George Katsimbalis
I
Last of the great autumnal capitals
Disengaging daily like a sword
The civil codes, behaviour, friendship, love,
In houses of shining glass,
On tablecloths stained with pools of light,
By the rambling river’s evening scents
Carried our freight of pain so lightly:
And towards evening when the inkwells overturn
And at last the figure which has sat
Motionless for hours, pours himself out
One glass of moonlight, drinks it, and retires.
By the railway arches a stone plinth.
Under the shadows of the lamps the figures.
So many ways of dividing up the self:
Correspondences moving outwards along a line
Of nerves, the memory of letters
Smelling like apples in an empty cupboard,
And at midnight the pall of clocks,
At odds among themselves, the shuffling
Of innumerable packs of cards where each shall see
One day his face instead of fortune’s be.
II
Bound here to the great axis of the sex,
Black source that feeds your manners, gives
Information and vivacity to food and linen,
Determined as the penetration into self-abuse—
For each separation by kisses forges new bonds:
Three or four words on the back of a letter,
Tessa waiting on a corner with all she feels,
Rain glittering in that peacock’s eye,
As heavy with sense as a king’s letter with seals.
Here the professional observer met you,
The amateur in melancholy,
To the swish of an invisible fountain,
Drinking from a glass under a man on horseback,
Talking to a lady with a poisoned finger.
Women turned over by the mind and each
A proper noun, an act of trespass,
Improper for its aberration but accepted
As in a mirror one is twice but accepts.
So in these magazines of love they moved,
Experience misbegotten in each face like rings
In wood, were commentators on our weakness,
Through cycles of repentance in the blood,
Exhausted the body’s ugly contents in a sigh,
Left, hard as ash, the object’s shape: an art
Eros began, self-murder carries on.
III
Of all the sicknesses, autumnal Paris,
This self-infection was the best, where friends
Like self-possession could be learned
Through the mystery of a slit
Like a tear in an old fur coat,
A hole in a paper lantern where the seeing I
Looked out and measured one:
The ferocious knuckle of a sex
Standing to acknowledge like a hambone
Our membership in the body of a tribe
Holy and ridiculous at once:
Symbol of unrecognised desire, pain, pain.
You might have seen silence flower in eyes,
The tobacco eyes of every human critic,
Or a mouth laid along the meniscus
Of a lighted glass blazing like a diamond.
All the great brothels closed save Sacré Coeur!
Windows boarded up from the inheritors,
The nameless donors inhabiting marble fanes
On peninsulas with cocks of gold in sunlight,
Under the oleanders, printed in warm moss,
The bare ankles playing on a flute,
Selecting the bodies of boys, the temporary
Refuge for a kiss on the silver backs of mirrors:
Powder of statues in a grove born old,
Born sightless, wingless, never to be loved.
IV
Crude man in his coat of nerves and hair
Whose kisses like apostles go about
On translated business never quite his own,
Derives from the obscure medium of the body,
As through some glass coffin, a retrievéd sprite,
Himself holding the holy bottle, fast asl
eep.
All these rotten galleries were symbols
Of us, where the girls like squirrels
Leaned in the tarnished mirrors sadly sighing:
The wind in empty clothing, while the destroyer
Sorted the bottles for just the right medicine.
Below us, far below on the stairway somewhere
Tessa had already combed the dark disorder
Of curls, the flash of pectorals in a mirror,
Invented already this darker niece of Egypt,
Who leaves the small hashish-pipe by the pillow,
Uneasy in red slippers like the dust in urns,
The smashed columns, wells full of leaves,
The faces white as burns.
V
We suffer according to the terms we make
With time in cities: allowing to be rooted from us
Like useless teeth the few great healers
Who understand the penalties of confession,
And cannot fear these half-invented Gods,
Inhabiting our own cities of unconquered pain.
Now the capitals settle slowly in the sea
Of their failures. All the common brute has done
Building like a rat the rotten shanties
Of his self-esteem beside the water’s edge,
His fear and prejudice into a dead index.
It is not enough. We have still to outgrow
The prohibitions in us with the fears they grow from:
For the beloved will be no happier
Nor the unloved less hungry when the miracle begins:
Yet both will be ineffably disclosed
In their own natures by simplicity
Like roses in a giving off of grace.
1948/1947
Puisqu’il lui est interdit d’éluder la contradiction aussi bien par le divertissement que par le suicide ou par le ‘saut’ mystique, quelle forme de vie adoptera L’Homme Absurde pour rester fidèle à sa vocation de lucidité?
Il s’attache à dégager non seulement l’opacité d’un corps de pierre ou d’une ‘chose de beauté’, mais aussi l’objectivité angoissante du Moi à l’égard du Je.
C’est ainsi que le Séducteur, le Comédien, le Conquérant et L’Artiste présentent ces traits communs de vivre dans L’Immédiat, de tendre à un renouvellement indéfini de leurs expériences, de sauvegarder à chaque moment leur lucidité dérisoire et leur libre disponibilité, d’accepter, enfin, le risque d’être damnés ou condamnés pour n’avoir prétendu recevoir leur bonheur que de leurs propres mains.
Le Sens de L’Absurde
GEORGES BLIN
POMONA DE MAILLOL
For Eve
An old man tamed his garden with wet clay
Until Pomona rose, a bubble in his arms.
The time and place grow ripe when the idea
Marries its proper image in volition,
When desire and intention kiss and bruise.
A cord passed round the body of the mermaid
Drew her sleeping from the underworld,
As when the breath of resin like a code
Rises from some unguarded still, Pomona
Breathing, surely a little out of breath
The image disengaging from the block,
A little out of breath, and wondering
If art is self-reflection, who he was
She woke within the side of, what old man
In his smock and dirty cap of cloth,
Drinking through trembling fingers now
A ten year siege of her, the joy in touching
The moistened flanks of her idea with all
An old man’s impatience of the carnal wish?
1948/1948
ANNIVERSARY
For T. S. Eliot
Poetry, science of intimacies,
In you his early roots drove through
The barbarian compost of our English
To sound new veins and marbled all his verses
Through and through like old black ledgers,
Hedging in pain by form, and giving
Quotations from the daily treaty poets make
With men, possessions or a private demon:
Became at last this famous solitary
Sitting at one bleak uncurtained window
Over wintry London patiently repeating
That art is determined by its ends
In conscience and in morals. This was startling.
Yet marriages might be arranged between
Old fashions and contemporary disorders.
Sole student of balance in a falling world
He helped us mend the little greenstick fractures
Of our verse, taught polish in austerity.
Others who know him will add private humours,
And photographs to albums; taken near Paris,
Say, drinking among some foreign dons all night
From leather bubbles in a tavern: a remark
That silenced a fussy duke: yet these
Alluding and delimiting can only mystify
The singer and his mystery more, they do not chain.
Neither may we ever explain but pointing
To a new star one needs new vision for
Like some late hornbeam risen over England,
Relate it to a single sitting man,
In a high window there, beside a lamp,
Some crumpled paper, a disordered bed.
1980/1948
THE CRITICS
They never credit us
With being bad enough
The boys that come to edit us:
Of simply not caring when a prize,
Something for nothing, comes our way,
A wife, a mistress, or a holiday
From People living neckfast in their lies.
No: Shakespear’s household bills
Could never be responsible, they say,
For all the heartbreak and the 1,000 ills
His work is heir to, poem, sonnet, play …
Emended readings give the real reason:
The times were out of joint, the loves, the season.
Man With A Message—how could you forget
To read your proofs, the heartache and the fret?
The copier or the printer
Must take the blame for it in all
The variants they will publish by the winter.
‘By elision we quarter suffering.’ Too true.
‘From images and scansion can be learned.’ …
Yet under it perhaps may be discerned
A something else afoot—a Thing
Lacking both precedent and name and gender:
An uncreated Weight which left its clue,
Making him run up bills,
Making him violent or distrait or tender:
Leaving for Stratford might have heard It say:
‘Tell them I won’t be back on Saturday.
My wife will understand I’m on a bender.’
And to himself muttering, muttering: ‘Words
Added to words multiply the space
Between this feeling and my expressing It.
The wires get far too hot. Time smoulders
Like a burning rug. I will be free.’ …
And all the time from the donkey’s head
The lover is whispering: ‘This is not
What I imagined as Reality.
If truth were needles surely eyes would see?’
1948/1948
PHILEREMO
A philosopher in search of human values
Might have seen something in the coarse
Black boots the guide wore when he led us:
Boots with cracked eyes and introspective
Laces, rich in historical error as this
Old wall we picked the moss from, reading
Into it invasions by the Dorians or Medes.
But the bearded arboreal historian
Saw nothing of it all, was nothing the
n.
His education had derailed the man
Until he moved, a literary reminiscence,
Through quotations only, fine as hair.
The stones spoke to him. Reflected there
In a cistern I heard you thinking: Europe
Also, the whole of our egopetal culture
Is done for and must vanish soon.
And still we have not undergone the poet’s truth.
Could he comfort us in more than this
Blue sea and air cohering blandly
Across that haze of flats,
The smoking middens of our history—
Aware perhaps only of the two children
Asleep in the car beside a bear in cotton gloves?
1948/1948
SONG FOR ZARATHUSTRA
Le saltimbanque is coming with
His heels behind his head.
His smile is mortuary and
His whole expression dead.
The acrobat, the acrobat,
Demanding since the Fall
Little enough but hempen stuff
To climb and hang us all.
Mysterious inventions like
The trousers and the hat
Bewitched our real intentions:
We sewed the fig-leaves flat.
Man sewed his seven pockets
Upon his hairy clothes
But woman in her own white flesh
Has one she seldom shows.
An aperture on anguish,
A keyhole on disgrace:
The features stay grimacing
Upon the mossy face.
A cup without a handle
A staff without a crook,
The sawdust in the golly’s head,