Collected Poems 1931-74

by Lawrence Durrell

  If space curves how much the more thought,

  Returning after every conjugation

  To the young point of rest it started in?

  The fulness of being is not in refinement,

  By the delimitation of the object, but

  In roundness, the embosoming of the Real.

  The egg, the cone, the rhombus: orders of reality

  Which declaim coldly against the reason:

  We may surround and view from every side,

  We may expound, break into fields of thought,

  But qualifying in this manner only spoil:

  On this derogatory wheel stands Man.

  Now who is greater than his greatest appetite?

  Who is weaker than the least of his fears?

  Who claims that he can match them perfectly,

  Apprehended without to unapprehended within?

  We Greeks were taught how to exhaust ideas,

  Melissa, but first begin with people. There we score!

  No Roman understood our sunny concupiscence,

  The fast republican colour of our values.

  Philosophy with us was not worked out.

  We used experience up. The rest precipitated.

  Soon we were still alive: but nothing else was left.

  V

  IN ATHENS

  At last with four peroxide whores

  Like doped marigolds growing upon this balcony,

  We wait for sunrise, all conscripted

  From our passions by the tedium and spleen,

  While the rich dews are forming

  On the mind of space already thick enough

  To cut with scythes on the wet marbles

  Of Acropolis, intentions murdered by the cold.

  I take her in my arms, a cobweb full of diamonds,

  Which by some culture might be tears or pearls….

  One speaks Turkish, slender as an ilex,

  Half asleep is boiling an egg;

  A Jewess, lovely, conspiratorial,

  Over a spirit-lamp by an hour-glass

  Too small to have been made for timing

  Anything much longer than a kiss.

  VI

  AT ALEXANDRIA

  Wind among prisms all tonight again:

  Alone again, awake again in the Sufi’s house,

  Cumbered by this unexpiring love,

  Jammed like a cartridge in the breech

  Leaving the bed with its dented pillow,

  The married shoes alert upon the floor.

  Is life more than the sum of its errors?

  Tubs of clear flesh, egyptian women:

  Favours, kohl, nigger’s taste of seeds,

  Pepper or lemon, breaking from one’s teeth

  Bifurcated as the groaning stalks of celery.

  Much later comes the tapping on the panel.

  The raven in the grounds:

  At four thirty the smell of satin, leather:

  Rain falling in the mirror above the mad

  Jumbled pots of expensive scent and fard,

  And the sense of some great impending scandal.

  VII

  AT ALEXANDRIA

  Sometime we shall all come together

  And it will be time to put a stop

  To this little rubbing together of minimal words,

  To let the Word Prime repose in its mode

  As yolk in its fort of albumen reposes,

  Contented by the circular propriety

  Of its hammock in the formal breathing egg.

  Much as in sculpture the idea

  Must not of its own anecdotal grossness

  Sink through the armature of the material,

  The model of its earthly clothing:

  But be a plumbline to its weight in space …

  The whole resting upon the ideogram

  As on a knifeblade, never really cutting,

  Yet always sharp, like this very metaphor

  For perpetual and useless suffering exposed

  By conscience in the very act of writing.

  VIII

  IN PATMOS

  Quiet room, four candles, red wine in pottery:

  Our conversation burning like a fuse,

  In this cone of light like some emulsion:

  Aristarchus of Samos was only half a man

  Believing he could make it all coherent

  Without the muddled limits of a woman’s arm,

  Darning a ladder, warming the begging-bowl.

  Quiet force of candles burning in pools of oak,

  Conducted by the annals of the word

  Towards poor Aristarchus. If he was only half

  A man, Melissa, then I am the other half,

  Not in believing with him but by failing to.

  IX

  IN PATMOS

  ‘Art adorns.’ Thus Galbo.

  Proconsuls should be taught to leave art alone.

  Before we came the men of the east

  Knew it contained a capital metaphysic,

  As chess once founded in astronomy

  Degenerated into the game we know.

  For the Western man of this Egopetal Age

  Cant, rules, pains and prohibitions,

  Each with its violent repulsive force.

  Only in this still round, touching hands,

  To live and lapse and die created,

  As Socrates died penniless to leave a fortune.

  X

  IN BRITAIN

  When they brought on the sleeping child

  Bandaged on its glittering trolley

  One could think no more of anecdotes:

  Ugly Sappho lying under an acorn wishing,

  Cyrano discountenanced by a nose like a wen,

  My father’s shadow telling me three times

  Not to play with the scissors: None of this,

  But of something inanimate about to be cut up:

  A loaf with the oven scent on it exhaling

  A breath of sacrifice, clouding the knife.

  XI

  IN BRITAIN

  Instead of this or that fictitious woman

  Marry a cloud and carve it in a likeness.

  XII

  IN RHODES

  Incision of a comb in hair: lips stained

  Blue as glass windows with the grapes

  We picked and tasted by ourselves in Greece.

  Such was the yesterday that made us

  Appropriates of a place, club-members

  Of an oleander-grove asleep in chairs.

  XIII

  IN PARIS

  In youth the decimal days for spending:

  Now in age they fall in heaps about me

  Thick in concussion as the apples

  Bouncing on drums to multiply the seasons

  On the floors of scented granaries,

  In memory, old barn, wrapped up in straw.

  Literarum oblivio … Now the Romans

  Are going to get the chance they ask for,

  That hated jurist’s tongue …

  Their violence will be greater than ours.

  Happily we shall not live to see it,

  Melissa, nurse, augur, special self.

  Once the statues lined the whole main-street

  Like nightmares, returning from her house,

  Night after night by rosy link-light,

  A rose between my teeth, by any other name.

  Now we sit in linen deck-chairs here

  Looking out to sea and eating olives

  From a painted jar: Flavia did this for me,

  Won me these favours, this exile from myself.

  The exile I had already begun, within myself

  She translated like a linguist: Paris.

  The King was a bore: it was not my fault he was:

  I loved her because I did not know myself.

  I knew her yet in the shadow cast by myself

  My love was hidden. How we deceive ourselves!

  Only our friends know if our wives
are faithful,

  They will never tell us. (Marc smiling.)

  Anyway, now, this animal concupiscence

  Of old age in a treaty port: still only consul.

  The meteors and the wild mares

  Are growing manes, my dear. Autumn is on the way.

  We crouch in the wrecked shooting-galleries of progress.

  And where you turn, black head of grapes, the sea

  Is bluer than forget-me-nots are blue,

  Where the linguist in you paraphrases sadly:

  The heart must be very old to feel so young.

  XIV

  IN BEIRUT

  After twenty years another meeting,

  Those faces round, as circumspect as eggshells:

  But in the candle-light fard

  Depicts its own origins and ends:

  Flesh murky as old horn,

  Hands dry now as sea-biscuit,

  Sipping the terrible beat of Time

  We talk about the past as if it were not

  Dead, that April when the ships pouted

  From breathless harbours north of Tenedos,

  And the green blood of the Delphic bushes

  Put back their ears

  Where the Greek wind ran, insisted, and became.

  Then of poor Clea: her soul sickened in her face

  Like flowers in some shadowy sick-room,

  How to recall that wingless sickle of a nose,

  Thinned out and famished into fever:

  The liquid drops of eyes, darkened by carbon,

  Brusque ways, an imperative style and voice—

  Always catching her dress in doors …

  Can we afford to consider ourselves more fortunate?

  Lips I would have died to hear speak

  Now held in complete sesame here

  By a fire of blue sea-coal,

  In Beirut, winter coming on.

  XV

  IN RHODES

  From the intellect’s grosser denominations

  I can sort one or two, how indistinctly,

  Living on as if in some unripened faculty

  Quite willing to release them, let them die.

  Putative mothers-in-ideas like that Electra’s

  Tallow orphan skin in a bed smelling faintly

  Of camphor, the world, the harsh laugh of Glauca:

  But both like geometrical figures now,

  Then musky, carmine … (I am hunting for

  The precise shade of pink for Acte’s mouth:

  Pink as the sex of a mastiff …)

  Now as the great paunch of this earth

  Allows its punctuation by seeds, some to be

  Trees, some men walking as trees, so the mind

  Offers its cakes of spore to time in them:

  The sumptuary pleasure-givers living on

  In qualities as sure as taste of hair and mouth,

  White partings of the hair like highways,

  Permutations of a rose, buried beneath us now,

  Under the skin of thinking like a gland

  Discharging its obligations in something trivial:

  Say a kiss, a handclasp: say a stone tear.

  They went. We did not hear them leave.

  They came. We were not ready for them.

  Then turning the sphere to death

  Which like some great banking corporation

  Threatens, forecloses, and from all

  Our poses selects the one sea-change—

  Naturally one must smile to see him powerless

  Not in the face of these small fictions

  But in the greater one they nourished

  By exhaustion of the surfaces of life,

  Leaving the True Way, so that suddenly

  We no longer haunted the streets

  Of our native city, guilty as a popular singer,

  Clad in the fur of some wild animal.

  XVI

  IN RIO

  And so at last goodbye,

  For time does not heed its own expenditure,

  As the heart does in making old,

  Infecting memory with a sigh-by-sigh,

  Or the intolerable suppurating hope and wish.

  It has no copy, moves in its own

  Blind illumination seriously,

  Traced somewhere perhaps by a yellow philosopher

  Motionless over a swanpan,

  Who found the door open—it always is:

  Who found the fire banked: it never goes out.

  We, my dear Melissa, are only typics of

  This Graeco-Roman asylum, dedicated here

  To an age of Bogue, where the will sticks

  Like a thorn under the tongue,

  Making our accent pain and not completeness.

  Do not interrupt me … Let me finish:

  Madmen established in the intellect

  By the domestic error of a mind that arranges,

  Explains, but can never sufficiently include:

  Punishes, exclaims, but never completes its arc

  To enter the Round. Nor all the cabals

  Of pity and endurance in the circus of art

  Will change it till the mainspring will is broken.

  Yet the thing can be done, as you say, simply

  By sitting and waiting, the mystical leap

  Is only a figure for it, it involves not daring

  But the patience, being gored, not to cry out.

  But perhaps even the desire itself is dying.

  I should like that: to make an end of it.

  It is time we did away with this kind of suffering,

  It has become a pose and refuge for the lazy:

  As for me I must do as I was born

  And so must you: upon the smaller part of the circle

  We desire fulfilment in the measure of our gift:

  You kiss and make: while I withdraw and plead.

  1948/1948

  A WATER-COLOUR OF VENICE

  Zarian was saying: Florence is youth,

  And after it Ravenna, age,

  Then Venice, second-childhood.

  The pools of burning stone where time

  And water, the old siege-masters,

  Have run their saps beneath

  A thousand saddle-bridges,

  Puffed up by marble griffins drinking,

  And all set free to float on loops

  Of her canals like great intestines

  Now snapped off like a berg to float,

  Where now, like others, you have come alone,

  To trap your sunset in a yellow glass,

  And watch the silversmith at work

  Chasing the famous salver of the bay …

  Here sense dissolves, combines to print only

  These bitten choirs of stone on water,

  To the rumble of old cloth bells,

  The cadging of confetti pigeons,

  A boatman singing from his long black coffin …

  To all that has been said before

  You can add nothing, only that here,

  Thick as a brushstroke sleep has laid

  Its fleecy unconcern on every visage,

  At the bottom of every soul a spoonful of sleep.

  1955/1950

  DEUS LOCI

  (Forio d’Ischia)

  I

  All our religions founder, you

  remain, small sunburnt deus loci

  safe in your natal shrine,

  landscape of the precocious southern heart,

  continuously revived in passion’s common

  tragic and yet incorrigible spring:

  in every special laughter overheard,

  your specimen is everything—

  accents of the little cackling god,

  part animal, part insect, and part bird.

  II

  This dust, this royal dust, our mother

  modelled by spring-belonging rain

  whose soft blank drops console

  a single vineyard’s fever or a region


  falls now in soft percussion on the earth’s

  old stretched and wrinkled vellum skin:

  each drop could make one think

  a footprint of the god, but out of season,

  yet in your sudden coming know

  life lives itself without recourse to reason.

  III

  On how many of your clement springs

  the fishermen set forth, the foresters

  resign their empty glasses, rise,

  confront the morning star, accept

  the motiveless patronage of all you are—

  desire recaptured on the sea or land

  in the fables of fish, or grapes held up,

  a fistful of some champion wine

  glowing like a stained-glass window

  in a drunkard’s trembling hand.

  IV

  All the religions of the dust can tell—

  this body of damp clay that cumbered so

  Adam, and those before, was given him,

  material for his lamp and spoon and body

  to renovate your terra cotta shrines

  whose cupids unashamed

  to make a fable of the common lot

  curled up like watchsprings in a kiss,

  or turned to putti for a lover’s bed,

  or amorini for a shepherd’s little cot.

  V

  Known before the expurgation of gods

  wherever nature’s carelessness exposed

  her children to the fear of the unknown—

  in families gathered by hopeless sickness

  about a dying candle, or in sailors

  on tilting decks and under shrouded planets:

  wherever the unknown has displaced the known