Collected Poems 1931-74
Page 16
The teapot with the nook.
The Rib is slowly waking
Within the side of Man
And le guignol is making
Its faces while it can.
Compose us in the finder
Our organs upside down,
The parson in his widow’s weeds,
The doctor in his gown.
What Yang and Yin divided
In one disastrous blunder
Must one day be united and
Let no man put asunder.
1948/1948
POLITICS
To George Seferis
Chemists might compare their properties:
The Englishman with his Apologising Bag,
The Ainu with interesting stone-age cuffs,
Or whoever invented stars as a witness:
Nations which through excess of sensibility
Repose in opium under a great leaf:
The French with their elastic manual code:
And so comparing, find the three common desires,
Of hunger, smiling, and of being loved.
Outside, I mean, the penumbra of the real
Mystery, the whole world as a Why.
Living purely in the naked How, so join
As the writer unites dissimilars
Or the doctor with his womb-bag joins
The cumbersome ends of broken bones in
A simple perishable function,
To exhale like a smoke ring the O: Joy.
1948/1948
THE DAILY MIRROR
Writing this stuff should not have been like
Suicide over some ordinary misapprehension:
A man going into his own house, say,
Turning out all the lights before undressing,
At the bedside of some lovely ignoramus
Whispering: ‘Tomorrow I swear is the last time.’
Or: ‘Believe, and I swear you will never die.’
This nib dragged out like the late train
Racing on iron bars for the north.
Target: another world, not necessarily better,
Of course, but different, completely different.
The hour-glass shifting its trash of seconds.
If it does not end this way perhaps some other.
Gossip lying in a furnished room, blinds drawn.
A poem with its throat cut from ear to ear.
1948/1948
SONG
Proffer the loaves of pain
Forward and back again,
By time’s inflexible quantum
They shall not meet this autumn.
Stone islets, stars in stations,
Crab up their false equations,
Whether they run or saunter
They shall not meet this winter.
Boredom of breathless swan
Whiteness they gazed upon,
At skylight a roamer.
They shall not meet in summer.
Fast on these capes of green
Silence falls in between
Finger and wedding-ring.
They shall not meet in spring.
1948/1948
PENELOPE
Look, on that hill we met
On this shoreline parted.
The experts sailed off northwards
With their spears, with the connivance
Of oracles to back them. I remained.
Tears weigh little upon the hands,
Tears weigh less in the eye than seeds
Shaken from the feverish totals
Blossoming on time’s pronouncing tree.
The seasons file their summaries
Overheard by the echoes in the wells,
Overlooked by the mirrors shod in horn,
Copied by spies, interpreters or witnesses.
The augurs in the delta have not once
Foreseen this dust upon an ageing eyeball,
Vitreous as sea-spun glass, this black
Sperm of winter sea we walk beside,
The marble onanism of these nymphs.
1948/1948
SWANS
Fraudulent perhaps in that they gave
No sense of muscle but a swollen languor
Though moved by webs: yet idly, idly
As soap-bubbles drift from a clay-pipe
They mowed the lake in tapestry,
Passing in regal exhaustion by us,
King, queen and cygnets, one by one.
Did one dare to remember other swans
In anecdotes of Gauguin or of Rabelais?
Some became bolsters for the Greeks,
Some rubber Lohengrins provided comedy.
The flapping of the wings excited Leda.
The procession is over and what is now
Alarming is more the mirror split
From end to end by the harsh clap
Of the wooden beaks, than the empty space
Which follows them about,
Stained by their whiteness when they pass.
We sit like drunkards and inhale the swans.
1948/1948
BERE REGIS
The colonial, the expatriate walking here
Awkwardly enclosing the commonwealth of his love
Stoops to this lovely expurgated prose-land
Where winter with its holly locks the schools
And spring with nature improvises
With the thrush on ploughland, with the scarecrow.
Moss walls, woollen forests, Shakespear, desuetude:
Roots of his language as familiar as salt
Inhaling cattle lick in this mnemonic valley
Where the gnats assort, the thrush familiarises,
And over his cottage a colloquial moon.
1948/1948
ON SEEMING TO PRESUME
On seeming to presume
Where earth and water plan
No place for him, no home
Outside the confining womb,
Mistake him if you can.
The rubber forceps do their job
And here at least stands man.
Refined by no technique
Beyond the great ‘I will’,
They pour the poison in,
Confuse the middle ear
Of his tormented dust,
Before the brute can speak
‘I will’ becomes ‘I must’.
Excluded from the true
Participating love
His conscience takes its due
From this excluding sense
His condemnation brought.
From past to future tense
He mutters on ‘I ought’.
He mutters on ‘I ought’.
Yet daring to presume
He follows to the stews
His sense of loathsomeness,
Frustration, daily news.
A scholarship in hate
Endows him limb by limb.
‘My mother pushed me from behind,
And so I learned to swim.’
The bunsen’s head of hair,
All fancy free and passion,
Till iron circumstance
Confirms him in his lies,
To walk the Hamlet fashion.
He wrings his hands and cries
‘I want to live’, but dies.
He wants to live but dies.
Return, return and find
Beneath what bed or table
The lovers first in mind
Composed this poor unstable
Derivative of clay,
By passion or by play,
That bears the human label.
What king or saint could guide
This caliban of gloom
So swaddled in despair
To breathe the factory’s air,
Or locked in furnished room
Weep out his threescore there
For daring to presume,
For daring to presume?
1948/1948
SELF TO NOT-SELF
; Darkness, divulge my share in light
As man in name though not in nature.
Lay down truth’s black hermetic wings
For less substantial things
To call my weight my own
By love’s nomenclature:
Matriculate by harmlessness
From this tuistic zone,
Possessing what I almost own.
And where each heap of music falls
Burns like a star below the sea
To light the ocean’s cracked saloons
And mirror its plurality
Through nature’s tideless nights and noons
Teach me the mastery of the curse,
The bending circumstance to free,
And mix my better with my worse.
1960/1948
PATMOS
Early one morning unremarked
She walked abroad to see
Black bitumen and roses
Upon the island shelf
To hear those inexperienced
Thrushes repeat their clauses
From some corruptible tree
All copied in herself.
When from the Grecian meadows
Responsive rose the larks,
Stiffly as if on strings,
Ebbing, drew thin as tops
While each in rising squeezed
His spire of singing drops
On that renewed landscape
Like semen from the grape.
1948/1948
THE LOST CITIES
For Paddy and Xan
One she floats as Venice might,
Bloated among her ambiguities:
What hebetude or carelessness shored up
Goths were not smart enough to capture.
The city, yes: the water: not the style.
Her dispossession now may seem to us
Idle and ridiculous, quivering
In the swollen woodwork of these
Floating carcases of the doges,
Dissolving into spires and cages of water:
Venice blown up, and turning green.
Another wears out humbly like a craft:
Red wells where the potter’s thumb
Sealed his jars of guaranteed oil.
That fluent thumb which presses
On history’s vibrating string,
Pressing here, there, in a wounded place.
Some have left names only: Carthage:
Where the traveller may squeeze out
A few drops of ink or salt,
On deserted promontories may think:
‘No wonder. A river once turned over
In its sleep and all the cities fled.’
Now in Greece which is not yet Greece
The adversary was also strong.
Yet here the serfs have built their discontents
As spiders do their junctions, here,
This orchard, painted tables set outside
A whitewashed house,
And on a rusty nail the violin
Is hanging by one wrist, still ownerless:
Disowned by the devastator and as yet
Uncherished by its tenants in the old
Human smells of excrement and cooking:
Waiting till the spades press through to us,
To be discovered, standing in our lives,
Rhodes, death-mask of a Greek town.
1948/1948
FUNCHAL
At Funchal the blackish yeast
Of the winter sea I hated rubbed
And gobbled on a thousand capes,
That crumble with the traveller’s confidence
In being alone, some who still tread
Decks as if they were green lawns;
But the water coiled backwards
Like a spring to press its tides
Idle and uniform as grapes in presses
Descrying a horizontal mood,
The weather slowing like a pedal,
Smelling of sick and spices,
Red leather and the spermy polish
Men in boots rub boldly on to brass.
But night is always night even here,
Beyond the introspective glare
Of the green islands on the awnings,
St. Vincent copied in the pupils,
Marrow of romance and old sea-fevers,
Seen from a sanded rail above the sharks
On this half-deck polished like a nape.
1955/1948
HIGH SIERRA
The grass they cropped converting into speed
Made green the concert of their hooves
Over the long serene sierras turning
In the axle of the sun’s eye
To legs as delicate as spiders’, picking out
Pathways for shadows mounted on them:
Enigma, Fosforos, and Indigo, which rumbled
Through the pursuing quarries like a wind
To where the paths fall, and we all of us
Go down with the sun, sierra by sierra, held
A moment rising in the stirrups, then abandoned
To where the black valleys from their shoes
Subtract sparks upon flints, and the long
Quivering swish of tails on flesh
Try to say ‘sleep’, try to say ‘food’ and ‘home’.
1960/1948
GREEN COCONUTS: RIO
At insular café tables under awnings
Bemused benighted half-castes pause
To stretch upon a table yawning
Ten yellow claws and
Order green coconuts to drink with straws.
Milk of the green loaf-coconuts
Which soon before them amputated stand,
Broken, you think, from some great tree of breasts,
Or the green skulls of savages trepanned.
Lips that are curved to taste this albumen,
To dredge with some blue spoon among the curds
Which drying on tongue or on moustache are tasteless
As droppings of bats or birds.
Re-enacting here a theory out of Darwin
They cup their yellow mandibles to shape
Their nuts, tilt them in drinking poses,
To drain them slowly from the very nape:
Green coconuts, green
Coconuts, patrimony of the ape.
1948/1948
CHRIST IN BRAZIL
Further from him whose head of woman’s hair
Grew down his slender back
Or whose soft palms were puckered where
The nails were driven in,
Rising, denounced the dust they were,
Became white lofts of witness to the sin.
Both here and on that partworn map
The legionary darned for Rome,
Further from Europe even, in Brazil
Warmed by the jungle’s sap,
Finding no home from home became
Dark consul for the countries of the Will.
Here named, there honoured, nowhere understood,
Riding over Rio on his cliffs of stone
Whose small original was wood,
In gradual petrifaction of his pain,
He spreads the conscript’s slow barbaric stain
Over the cities of the flesh, his widowhood.
1948/1948
THE ANECDOTES
I
IN CAIRO
Garcia, when you drew off those two
White bullfighting gloves your hairy
Fingers spread themselves apart,
And then contracted to a hand again,
Attached to an arm, leading to a heart,
And I suddenly saw the cottage scene
Where the knocking on the door is repeated
Nobody answers it: but inside the room
The fox has its head under the madman’s shirt.
II
IN CAIRO
Nostos home: algos pain: nostalgia …
The homing pain f
or such as are attached:
Odours that hit and rebuff in some garden
Behind the consul’s house, the shutters drawn:
In the dark street brushed by a woman’s laugh.
Ursa Major to the sailor could spell wounds,
More than the mauling of the northern bear,
At the hub of the green wheel, standing on the sea.
Home for most is what you can least bear.
Ego gigno lumen, I beget light
But darkness is also of my nature.
(For such as sail out beyond
The proper limits of their own freewill.)
III
AT RHODES
Anonymous hand, record one afternoon,
In May, some time before the fig-leaf:
Boats lying idle in the sky, a town
Thrown as on a screen of watered silk,
Lying on its side, reddish and soluble,
A sheet of glass leading down into the sea …
Down here an idle boy catches a cicada:
Imprisons it, laughing, in his sister’s cloak
In whose warm folds the silly creature sings.
Shape of boats, body of a young girl, cicada,
Conspire and join each other here,
In twelve sad lines against the dark.
IV
AT RHODES