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Collected Poems 1931-74

Page 24

by Lawrence Durrell


  In writing of him. I just fict.

  Unfashionable if you wish, or even unreal

  So to evict the owner from his acts

  In propria persona; spit out the bones

  When once the bloody platter’s licked.

  Of course things experienced or overheard

  Swarm up the wall and knock;

  But we disperse them as they flock

  And redistribute, word by silly word.

  But when Totals turn up and insist

  We give them way; and only then you see,

  However chimerical or choice or few,

  One cannot copy to unearth the new.

  1966/1966

  CONFEDERATE

  At long last the wind has decided for itself,

  Skies arch and glass panes shudder inwards,

  My shutter croaks and now you tell me

  It is time for those last few words. Very well.

  Epoch of a whitewashed moon with

  Frost in the bulb and the quailing local blood.

  Very well; for not in this season will kisses

  Dig any deeper into the mind to seek

  The mislaid words we have been seeking,

  Delegates of that place which once

  The whole of suffering seemed to occupy—

  O nothing really infernal, a simple darkness.

  But because I came both grew abruptly

  Aware of all the surrounding armies

  So many faces torn from the same world,

  Whole lives lost by mere inattention.

  1973/1967

  OWED TO AMERICA

  I

  America America

  I see your giant image stir

  O land of milk and bunny

  Where the blue Algonquin flows

  Where the scrapers scrape the ceiling

  With that dizzy topless feeling

  And everything that simply has to, goes!

  II

  Land of Doubleday and Dutton

  Huge club sandwiches of mutton

  More zip-fastener than button

  Where the blue Algonquin flows

  Home of musical and mayhem

  Robert Frost and Billy Graham

  Where you drain their brains but pay ’em

  Then with dry Martinis slay ’em

  Everyone that drinks ’em knows.

  III

  America America

  Terra un peu hysterica

  For me as yet incognita

  I see your giant image stir

  Here no waffle lacks for honey

  Avenues paved with easy money

  Land of helpless idealism

  Clerical evangelism

  Land of prune and sometimes prism

  Every kind of crazy ism

  Where the blue Algonquin flows.

  IV

  America America

  So full of esoterica

  One day I’ll pierce the veils that hide

  The spirit of the great divide

  The sweet ambition which devours

  You, super duper power of powers—

  But for the nonce I send you flowers.

  V

  If there was a cake you’d take it

  If I had one heart you’d break it

  Where the blue Algonquin flows

  Looking forward, looking back

  There seems nothing that you lack

  America America

  Pray accept this cordial greeting

  On a visit far too fleeting

  Rest assured I’ll soon be back.

  1980/1968

  THE OUTER LIMITS

  The pure form, then, must be the silence?

  I’d tear out a leaf of it and spread it,

  The second skin of music, yes,

  And with a drypoint then etch in quick

  Everything that won’t talk back, like

  Frost or rain or the budget of spring:

  Even some profligate look or profitable

  Embrace—here to imprison it,

  So full of a gay informal logic,

  A real reality realising itself,

  No pressures but candid as a death,

  A full foreknowledge of the breathing game

  Taut as a bent bow the one simple life

  Too soon over, too soon cold; memory

  Will combine for you voice, odour, smile.

  1973/1968

  SOLANGE

  Author’s Note

  This poem was originally written at the same time as ‘Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels’ (c. 1938), but I wasn’t happy with it and the draft was left behind in a notebook until 1967, when I retouched it and lengthened it by about half.

  I

  Solange Bequille b. 1915 supposedly

  Far from Paris towards April sometime,

  Familiar of the familiar XIV arrondissement

  four steps up

  four steps down

  two three four five

  where the sewers discharge

  by the turret of an urinal

  six seven eight

  steel ducts voiding

  in shade and out of the wind …

  Relatively impossible despite so much practice

  To word-parody the tantamount step, but easier

  Copy for the lens a powder-blue raincoat, beret,

  Cicada brooch, belted and bolted waist of wasp,

  Dumb insolent regimental shoes, sheeny rings,

  The whole of it amberstuck through twenty winters,

  Carried round the globe in damp suitcases,

  Some pedlar’s pack of visionary ware like

  Her rings of a vulgar water reflecting

  black testicles of buoys

  tugging at the Seine

  lovers in leaden coffins

  pelting the dead with crusts

  the prohibitions of loneliness

  being twenty-two with a war

  hanging over them, its belly hard,

  noting the orgasm of Hegel

  defining all death as ‘the

  collapse into immediacy’.

  Ah, dangerous salients of youth,

  loving in a crucial month.

  II

  Over the bridges the meandering scholars

  Deambulating flowed over the Pons Asinorum

  Of the five arts between the capable white

  Wide-flowing thighs of their seventh muse,

  A sharpshooter by a steel turret

  Waiting to smelt down whole faculties,

  Captives of youthful salt with their elaborate tensions,

  They passed and passed but always hesitated,

  Leaving their satchels when they could not pay,

  The score was kept on a matchboard wall.

  A hundred a quick one, five the whole night,

  Whole doctorates granted in prime embraces.

  The arts of the capital being matured and focused.

  Five for the collective wisdom of this great city!

  baisers O noirs essaims

  desires grown fair of dark

  the cross-roads of smiling eyes

  complexities of season, spring

  or winter’s black water

  bridges of funereal soot

  working with pink tongue or tooth

  towards some mystical emphasis,

  a life without sanctions

  in the forever, so long ago,

  so far away from all this

  contemporary whimperdom

  Solange

  sole angel of the seekers,

  their prop medal and recourse

  faces crisper than oak-leaves

  your burial service covered all

  the coward and the brave

  the perfectly solid fact as

  symbol of humanity’s education

  less a woman with legs than

  something, say that oven into which

  Descartes locked himself in order

  to enunc
iate the first principle

  of his system; the oven Planck

  consulted after all the

  spectroscope’s thrilling finery

  to deduce the notion of quanta.

  Always the same oven, never any bread,

  the XXth century loaf is an equation

  Solange

  be like mirrors accumulating nothing.

  III

  The change from C major to A flat

  Is always associated with summary thefts,

  Certain women powdered by suns,

  Street-lamps’ fresh breath in cradles,

  As simply as birds reacting to rain

  We recover small fragments of the unknowable

  To render back to nature her darkest intents

  In allegorical bandages of old hotels

  Receiving into their no-womb the anti-heroes,

  Tang of the metro and rotting dustbins

  Needles seeking the iron vein

  Astrology’s damp syringe

  a woman of good intent

  distributing the river winds,

  drawing with scarlet fingernail

  on foggy panes high above Paris,

  one glassed-in balcony

  with tubs for plants’ green hives

  so apt for tall trees’ dews

  days robbed and nights replaced

  whatever the single vision traced

  four steps up

  four steps down

  wherever the emphasis was placed

  whoever the woman’s image finds

  dyed into living minds

  By the dead butts of infernal cinemas

  Or at the Medrano lulled by some old

  Circus animal’s tarnished roars,

  See the heads discharged by guns in baskets falling

  Smelling of new bread or blood. The muscles

  Now hanging in Museums, the thoracic cage shaken

  By typical sobs, the eyes of congers’ spawn,

  Then the plumage of soft shrieks in dark streets,

  The running feet, silence, and something lying

  In Paris on such April nights when stars

  Crunch underfoot the Luxembourg’s cool gravels,

  Night poised like a lion’s paw

  Where her prowl crosses some angle of the abstract town.

  four steps up

  four steps down

  where the sewers discharge

  by the urinal’s turret

  stairs too narrow for the coffin,

  minds too narrow for recognitions,

  hearts too severe for introspection,

  different categories of the same

  insolent vision marrying

  four steps up

  confederates of the darkness

  soon they must all die or

  go away, soon you will be left

  alone, writing wholly for yourself,

  struggling with the idea of a city

  a whore of the city’s inward meaning,

  animal intents all bruising

  the wingpoint of other myths

  outmoded or outvoted gods

  the muffled censors of the time

  ripening in the latest ages

  beyond the scope of liveried men

  past the intentions of the wise

  towards a death promoted by the sages.

  IV

  Even then was he somehow able to undress his dolls’ thoughts to sleep beside the sleeper, lay figures of the dreams which uncoiled among the mnemonic centres of the mind which thinks without knowing that it thinks, slips, punctures process with ideas. Faut-il enfin dépasser le point de tangence qui sépare l’art et la science, tout en les traitant comme les religions primitives en faillite? Oui mais comment? Even then, even then; but his snores might not awake the tiny amorous snores as of the congress of guinea-pigs in vivisectionists’ cages, unaware of being watched, syringe in hand. Et le chaos même, dandy ou nègre? Faut-il éprouver la plénitude charnelle d’un acte spontané? In the cheap edition of ‘Causality’ she had given Leibniz a moustache and printed a lipstick kiss to hide the crucial figure, adding in the margin the proverbial merde. If only she could have delivered him from the vices of introspection, the verses in p’tit nègre, the torn paper tablecloths with their thorny sketches; but alas vers libre is like le ver solitaire. The head shows and the atlas of the stare; it can be broken off by the forceps, but there will always be more packed in the gut. Beware.

  the communes raise their walls

  around the dreamer’s bed,

  cold crusts of cults devoured

  the science-mocking magics spread

  like viruses distributed

  by the redeemers’ dreams

  on altars sourly smoke

  the witnesses disperse

  among the smoke of thought

  to share the ignoble joke

  some medieval urinals

  mingle the proferred wine

  to pour from snouts of stone

  the griffins far below

  on the river’s quays

  famous star-waterways incline

  turn water into wine,

  the simple torturers go

  when night undresses all the trees

  unsleeping gargoyles tell you so.

  V

  Born of torpid country-folk versed in cumbrous ways and too haphazard to chime with this spawn of factories with anvils and poisonous oxygen, this decomposing fabric of stone, the sepia cards of churches begging for disablement pensions; but kindly stubborn intractable stock, she imported into the deadly estate of the town frail rural virtues, rotted in a primeval humus. Gone this Solange or that, but the mould remained unbroken revolving through worlds of dissimulation, spheres, hatcheries of unique sensation, seen through the pinshead of a tiny mind. Turning slightly towards the sun as winter flowers may do, the bonfires and speeches and the eternal inquests within the frontiers of the self, still the fated questions yawned as they do for all of us. And what then of Pascal, the man she loved: sullen, morose and leaden when not in the air flying from ring to ring with an acrobat’s fury, the webbed feet, sympelmous toes, O rabid specialist in a bird’s beauty. They exchanged wordless days, and doses, the sempiternal clap. In full flight over the city he took her like a ring, swung over the edge of the abyss. I studied their famous loves to reimburse myself. Once I saw the expression on his face which must have settled her fate—in mid-air swinging in an orgasm of fear and stress, but shriven too; this look had impaled her mind. Then he went, without saying goodbye, perhaps on tour, but never to return I believe; perhaps much later to dangle from some whore’s rafter or at the end of a silken parachute illustrating some mysterious law. But his undertow haunted her body for a season, celebrated in absinthe and funereal silences; many profited from this experience, many coupled through her with the wiry loins and loafing smile.

  statues on cubes of frost

  equestrian pigments of the snow

  somewhere the carrefour was crossed

  munching footsteps trail and slow

  stealthy gravels underfoot

  sectioned by the tawny bars

  street lamps fiction up the dusk

  world unending of past wars

  when will the exemplars come

  four steps up

  four steps down

  where the sewers discharge

  by the urinal’s turret.

  VI

  The dreams of Solange confused no issues, solved no problems, for on the auto-screen among our faces appeared always and most often others like Papillon the tramp, a childhood scarecrow built of thorns. He turned the passive albums of her sleep with long fingers, one of them a steel hook. Papillon represented a confederacy of buried impulses which could resurrect among the tangled sheet, a world of obscure resentments, fine and brutal as lace, the wedding-cake lying under its elaborate pastry. His ancient visions sited in that crocodile-mask fired her. And such dreams as he recounted revived among her
own—Paris as some huge penis sliced up and served around a whole restaurant by masked waiters. And the lovers murmuring ‘I love you so much I could eat you’. She takes up knife and fork and begins to eat. The screams might awake her, bathed in sweat, to hear the real face of Marc the underwriter saying something like: ‘All our ills come from incautious dreaming.’ There were so many people in the world, how to count them all? Perhaps causality was a way of uniting god with laughter? Solange avec son œil luisant et avide, holding a handbag full of unposted cards.

  Add to the faces the Japanese student whose halting English was full of felicities only one could notice; as when ‘Lord Byron committed incense with his sister, and afterwards took refuse in the church’. He too for a season cast a spell. Then one day he recited a poem which met with her disfavour.

  She was eighteen but already god-avowed,

  She sought out the old philosopher

  Expressly to couple with him, so to be

  Bathed in the spray of his sperm

  The pneuma of his inner idea.

  Pleasure and instruction were hers,

  She corrected her course by his visions.

  But of all this a child was born,

  But in him, not in her, as a poem

  With as many legs as a spider

  In a web the size of a world.

  Then Deutre, the latest of our company

  Who believed all knowledge to be founded

  Deep in the orgasm, rising into emphasis

  As individual consciousness, the know-thyself,

  Bit by bit, with checks and halts, but always

  By successive amnesias dragged into conception,

  A school of pneuma for the inward eye

  Reflecting rays which pass in deliberate tangence

  To the ordinary waking sense, focuses the heart.

  Patiently must Solange pan for male gold

  White legs spread like geometer’s compasses

  Over her native city. The milk-teeth fall at last.

  Gradually the fangs develop, breathing changes,

  And out of the tapestry of monkey grimaces

  Born of no diagrams no act of will

  But simple subservience to a natural law, He comes,

 

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