Collected Poems 1931-74

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Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 18

by Lawrence Durrell


  you encouraged in the fellowship of wine

  of love and husbandry: and in despair

  only to think of you and you were there.

  VI

  The saddle-nose, the hairy thighs

  composed these vines, these humble vines,

  so dedicated to themselves yet offering

  in the black froth of grapes their increment

  to pleasure or to sadness where a poor

  peasant at a husky church-bell’s chime

  crosses himself: on some cracked pedestal

  by the sighing sea sets eternally up,

  item by item, his small mid-day meal,

  garlic and bread, the wine-can and the cup.

  VII

  Image of our own dust in wine!

  drinkers of that royal dust pressed out

  drop by cool drop in science and in love

  into a model of the absconding god’s

  image—human like our own. Or else in other

  mixtures, of breath in kisses dropped

  under the fig’s dark noonday lantern, yes,

  lovers like tenants of a wishing-well

  whose heartbeats labour through all time has stopped.

  VIII

  Your panic fellowship is everywhere,

  Not only in love’s first great illness known,

  but in the exile of objects lost

  to context, broken hearts, spilt milk,

  oaths disregarded, laws forgotten:

  or on the seashore some old pilot’s

  capital in rags of sail, snapped oars,

  water-jars choked with sand,

  and further on, half hidden, the fatal letter

  in the cold fingers of some marble hand.

  IX

  Deus loci your provinces extend

  throughout the domains of logic,

  beyond the eyes watching from dusty murals,

  or the philosopher’s critical impatience

  to understand, to be done with life:

  beyond beyond even the mind’s dark spools

  in a vine-wreath or an old wax cross

  you can become the nurse and wife of fools,

  their actions and their nakedness—

  all the heart’s profit or the loss.

  X

  So today, after many years, we meet

  at this high window overlooking

  the best of Italy, smiling under rain,

  that rattles down the leaves like sparrow-shot,

  scatters the reapers, the sunburnt girls,

  rises in the sour dust of this table,

  these books, unfinished letters—all

  refreshed again in you O spirit of place,

  Presence long since divined, delayed, and waited for,

  And here met face to face.

  1955/1950

  EPITAPH

  Stavro’s dead. A truant vine

  Grows out of him at either end

  Like muscles through the trunk and spine

  For wine was Stavro’s closest friend.

  Up through the barrel of the chest

  To scatter on his polished dome

  A vine-leaf from the poet’s crown.

  The pint-pot was his only home.

  Out of this confusing paste

  The best of us are only made,

  Sleep and sloth and wine were his

  Who drank and drank and never paid.

  Beauty vomit truth and waste

  Somehow joined to give him grace

  Who clasped the sky’s blue demijohn

  Drunk, in a drowning man’s embrace.

  Silenus of these olive-groves

  He broached a wine-dark universe

  And tasted on the crater’s brim

  Mother lover hearth and nurse.

  The vulgar grape his earthly task:

  Wine was a cradle, muse and guide,

  Till body like some leather flask

  Matured a laughing sun inside.

  His bounty was life’s usufruct:

  Such lips to lay at nature’s breast

  With earth below and sky above,

  Till tapsters lay us all to rest.

  Stained tablecloths for epitaphs!

  Set us full glasses nose to nose!

  Good drunkards, pledge him with your laughs

  Before the city’s taverns close.

  1968/1950

  EDUCATION OF A CLOUD

  You saw them, Sabina? Did you see them?

  Yet the education of this little cloud

  Full of neglect, allowed remissly so to lie

  Unbrushed in some forgotten corner

  Of a Monday-afternoon-in-April sky …

  The rest abandoned it in passing by,

  The swollen red-eyed country-mourners,

  Unbarbered, marching on some Friday-the-thirteenth.

  They knew it was not of the savage

  Winter company, this tuffet for a tired cherub,

  But a dear belonging of the vernal age,

  Say spring, provinces of the nightingale,

  Say love, the ministry of all distresses,

  Say youth, Sabina, let us call it youth—

  All the white capes of fancy seen afar!

  1955/1950

  THE SIRENS

  Trembling they appear, the Siren isles,

  Bequeathing lavender and molten rose,

  Reflecting in the white caves of our sails

  Melodious capes of fancy and of terror,

  Where now the singers surface at the prow,

  Begin the famous, pitiless, wounded singing …

  Ulysses watching, like many a hero since,

  Thinks: ‘Voyages and privations!

  The loutish sea which swallows up our loves,

  Lying windless under a sky of lilac,

  Far from our home, the longed-for landfall …

  By God! They choose their time, the Sirens.’

  Every poet and hero has to face them,

  The glittering temptresses of his distraction,

  The penalties which seek him for a hostage.

  Homer and Milton: both were punished in their gift.

  1955/1951

  CHANEL

  Scent like a river-pilot led me there:

  Bedroom darkness spreading like a moss,

  The polished wells of floors in blackness

  Gave no reflections of the personage,

  Or the half-open door, but whispered on:

  ‘Skin be supple, hair be smooth,

  Lips and character attend

  In mnemonic solitude.

  Kisses leave no fingerprints.’

  ‘Answer.’ But no answer came.

  ‘Beauty hunted leaves no clues.’

  Yet as if rising from a still,

  Perfume whispered at the sill,

  All those discarded husks of thought

  Hanging untenanted like gowns,

  Rinds of which the fruit had gone …

  Still the long chapter led me on.

  Still the clock beside the bed

  Heart-beat after heart-beat shed.

  1955/1951

  CRADLE SONG

  Erce … Erce … Erce

  Primigravida

  curled like a hoop in sleep

  unearthly of manufacture,

  tissue of blossom and clay

  bone the extract of air

  fountain of nature.

  softly knitted by kisses,

  added to stitch by stitch,

  by sleep of the dying heart,

  by water and wool and air,

  gather a fabric rich.

  earth contracted to earth

  in ten toes: the cardinals.

  in ten fingers: the bishops.

  ears by two, eyes by two,

  watch the mirror watching you,

  and now hush

  the nightwalkers bringing peace,

  seven the badges of grace

  five the straw caps of tale
nt,

  one the scarf of desire, go

  mimic your mother’s lovely face.

  1955/1951

  CLOUDS OF GLORY

  The baby emperor,

  reigning on tuffet, throne or pot

  in his minority knows hardly what

  he is, or is not,

  sagely he confers

  his card of humours like a vane,

  veering by fair to jungle foul

  so shapes his course

  through variable back to fine again.

  Then

  fingers dangle over him: beanstalks,

  chins like balconies impend:

  kisses like blank thunder bang

  above the little mandarin,

  or like a precious ointment prest

  from tubes are different kisses

  to the suffrage of a grin.

  He can outface

  a hundred generations with a yawn

  this Faustus of the pram,

  spreadeagled like a starfish, or

  some uncooked prawn

  with pink and toothless mandible

  advance the proposition:

  ‘I

  cry, therefore I am.’

  the baby emperor

  O lastly see

  in exile on his favourite St. Helena,

  corner of a lost playground gazing

  into a dark well,

  manufacturing images of a lost past,

  expense of spirit in a waste of longing,

  sea-nymphs hourly

  ring his knell.

  small famulus of Time!

  born to the legation of our dark unknowing

  the seed was not of your

  sowing, nor did you make these tall

  untoppled walls

  to sit here like a prisoner remembering

  only as a poem now

  the past, the white breasts

  that once leaned over you like waterfalls.

  1955/1951

  RIVER WATER

  The forest wears its coats

  of oil-paint as lightly can

  what only brush-strokes built,

  feather and leaf and spray,

  married by choice and plan.

  Curve of the Danube’s wrist

  leans from its mossy bed,

  takes the bias of earth with it

  the camber of earth and sky,

  divides with a ruler of lead.

  Soft as an ant’s patrol

  fingers to fingers warm,

  to relive in a favourite’s touch,

  warm as the oven-loaf,

  to finger and wrist and arm.

  We know that the dead forget:

  the living reside in touch,

  sweet consonance of a kiss,

  or a letter from distant home,

  says little and yet so much.

  So much yet never enough

  in the concert of night and day,

  but revisit us like the dead

  kisses that rise to our lips

  confused in the river’s spray.

  Dead kisses revisit the living

  in guises our bodies abet,

  for mouth or elbow or thigh:

  for the living must always remember

  what the dead can never forget.

  1955/1951

  SARAJEVO

  Bosnia. November. And the mountain roads

  Earthbound but matching perfectly these long

  And passionate self-communings counter-march,

  Balanced on scarps of trap, ramble or blunder

  Over traverses of cloud: and here they move,

  Mule-teams like insects harnessed by a bell

  Upon the leaf-edge of a winter sky,

  And down at last into this lap of stone

  Between four cataracts of rock: a town

  Peopled by sleepy eagles, whispering only

  Of the sunburnt herdsman’s hopeless ploy:

  A sterile earth quickened by shards of rock

  Where nothing grows, not even in his sleep,

  Where minarets have twisted up like sugar

  And a river, curdled with blond ice, drives on

  Tinkling among the mule-teams and the mountaineers,

  Under the bridges and the wooden trellises

  Which tame the air and promise us a peace

  Harmless with nightingales. None are singing now.

  No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous

  Dark beauty flowering under veils,

  Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style:

  A village like an instinct left to rust,

  Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot.

  1955/1951

  A BOWL OF ROSES

  ‘Spring’ says your Alexandrian poet

  ‘Means time of the remission of the rose’

  Now here at this tattered old café,

  By the sea-wall, where so many like us

  Have felt the revengeful power of life,

  Are roses trapped in blue tin bowls.

  I think of you somewhere among them—

  Other roses—outworn by our literature,

  Made tenants of calf-love or else

  The poet’s portion, a black black rose

  Coughed into the helpless lap of love,

  Or fallen from a lapel—a night-club rose.

  It would take more than this loving imagination

  To claim them for you out of time,

  To make them dense and fecund so that

  Snow would never pocket them, nor would

  They travel under glass to great sanatoria

  And like a sibling of the sickness thrust

  Flushed faces up beside a dead man’s plate.

  No, you should have picked one from a poem

  Being written softly with a brush—

  The deathless ideogram for love we writers hunt.

  Now alas the writing and the roses, Melissa,

  Are nearly over: who will next remember

  Their spring remission in kept promises,

  Or even the true ground of their invention

  In some dry heart or empty inkwell?

  1955/1953

  LESBOS

  The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint,

  And earth’s huge camber follows out,

  Turning in sleep, the oceanic curve,

  Defined in concave like a human eye

  Or cheek pressed warm on the dark’s cheek,

  Like dancers to a music they deserve.

  This balcony, a moon-anointed shelf

  Above a silent garden holds my bed.

  I slept. But the dispiriting autumn moon,

  In her slow expurgation of the sky

  Needs company: is brooding on the dead,

  And so am I now, so am I.

  1955/1953

  LETTERS IN DARKNESS

  (Belgrade)

  19 February 1952

  So many mockers of the doctrine

  Turn away, try not to hear

  The antinomian butchers

  In the grape-vine of ideas.

  It is we who observe who suffer,

  We who confide who lie …

  They are pulling and snapping

  The disordered vine-limbs, Dionysus,

  The body of our body once divine,

  Replacing the coveted order of desire

  With all the lumber love can leave,

  A star entombed in flesh, desirelessness,

  In some ghostly bedroom rented for a night.

  22 February 1952

  Connive, Connive,

  For the great wheel is turning

  Under the politics of the hive.

  Connive, for everywhere

  Hermits and patron-saints

  On the great star-wheel crucified

  Pinned out lie burning, burning,

  And life is being delivered to the half-alive.

  24 February 1952

  Old cock-pheasants when you hit one<
br />
  Lumber and burst upon the ground,

  The body’s plump contraption splits

  Their lagging rainbow into bits.

  So marriage can, by ripeness bound,

  From over-ripeness qualify

  To sick detachment in the mind—

  Dreams bursting at the seams to die

  By colder coitus in the mind of God,

  Stitches ripped up which used to hold

  The modern heart from growing cold.

  Now logic founders, speech begins.

  Symbols sketch a swaying bridge

  Between the states at peace or war,

  Athens or Sparta fighting for

  What foolish head or fond heart wins.

  Much later will the lover coax

  Out of the bestiary of his heart

  The little hairy sexer, Pan,

  The turning-point—pure laughter,

  To make the reckoning round and full

  If Jill comes tumbling after.

  He lies in his love in shadowless content

  As tongue in mouth, as poems in a skull.

  27 February 1952

  Jupiter, so lucky when he lay

  Trampling among the roses: bodies

  Of young girls … a cage of sighs

  Beside a drifting river-picture

  Was all the poet wished in youth;

  But later saw the glistening dewlap

  Of the man-bull, heard the cries,

  The squat consorts of the passion

  Twisted like figs into the legs

 

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