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Selected Poems

Page 13

by Cunard, Nancy; Parmar, Sandeep;


  One foot on the stair delaying, that turns again.

  London –

  youth and heart-break

  Growing from ashes.

  The war’s dirges

  Burning, reverberate – burning

  Now far away, sea-echoed, now in the sense,

  Taste, mind, uneasy quest of what I am –

  London, the hideous wall, the jail of what I am,

  With fear nudging and pinching

  Keeping each side of me

  Down one street and another, lost –

  Returned to search through adolescent years

  For key, for mark of what was done and said.

  Do ghosts alone possess the outworn decade?

  Souls fled, bones scattered –

  And still the vigilant past

  Crowds, climbs, insinuates its whispering vampire-song:

  (No more, oh never, never…)

  Are the living ghosts to the dead, or do the dead disclaim

  This clutch of hands, the tears cast out to them?

  Must one be courteous, halve defunct regrets,

  Present oneself as host to ‘Yester-year’?

  By the Embankment I counted the grey gulls

  Nailed to the wind above a distorted tide.

  On discreet waters

  In Battersea I drifted, acquiescent.

  And on the frosted paths of suburbs

  At Wimbledon, where the wind veers from the new ice,

  Solitary.

  In Gravesend rusty funnels rise on the winter noon

  From the iron-crane forests, with the tide away from the rank mud.

  Kew in chestnut-time, September in Oxford Street

  Through the stale hot dust –

  And up across the murk to Fitzroy Square

  With a lemon blind at one end, and the halfway spire

  Attesting God on the right hand of the street –

  London –

  Old.

  Dry bones turfed over by reiterant seasons,

  Dry graves filled in, stifled, built upon with new customs.

  Well, instead –

  The south, and its enormous days;

  Light consuming the sea, and sun-dust on the mountain,

  Churn of the harbour, the toiling and loading, unloading

  By tideless seas

  In a classic land, timeless and hot.

  Trees

  Bowed to the immemorial Mistral

  The evergreens, the pines,

  Open their fans –

  Red-barked forest,

  O vast, brown, terrible,

  Silent and calcinated.

  Moonstruck, dewless…

  Or further

  I know a land… red earth, ripe vines and plane-trees,

  A gulf of mournful islands, best from afar.

  The sunset’s huge surrender

  Ripens the dead-sea fruit in decaying saltmarsh.

  Then brain sings out to the night muffled thirds,

  Resumes the uneasy counting and the planning –

  What wings beat in my ears

  The old tattoo of journeys?

  Why dreamer, this is the dream,

  The question’s answer. And yet, and yet,

  The foot’s impatient (…where?) the eye is not convinced,

  Compares, decides what’s gone was better,

  Murmurs about ‘lost days’…

  Sit then, look in the deep wells of the sky,

  Compose the past –

  Dry moss, grey stone,

  Hill ruins, grass in ruins

  Without water, and multitudinous

  Tintinnabulation in poplar leaves;

  A spendrift dust from desiccated pools,

  Spider in draughty husks, snail on the leaf –

  Provence, the solstice.

  And the days after,

  By the showman’s travelling houses, the land caravels

  Under the poplar – the proud grapes and the burst grape-skins.

  Arles in the plain, Miramas after sunset-time

  In a ring of lights,

  And a pale sky with a sickle-moon.

  Thin winds undress the branch, it is October.

  And in Les Baux

  An old life slips out, patriarch of eleven inhabitants –

  ‘Fatigué’ she said, a terse beldam by the latch,

  ‘Il est fatigué, depuis douze ans toujours dans le même coin.’

  In Aix, what’s remembered of Cézanne?

  A house to let (with studio) in a garden.

  (Meanwhile, ‘help yourself to these ripe figs, profitez…

  And if it doesn’t suit, we, Agence Sextus, will find you another just as good.’)

  The years are sewn together with thread of the same story;

  Beauty picked in a field, shaped, re-created,

  Sold and despatched to distant Municipality –

  But in the Master’s town

  Merely an old waiter, crossly,

  ‘Of course I knew him, he was a dull silent fellow,

  Dead now.’

  And Beauty walked alone here,

  Unpraised, unhindered,

  Defiant, of single mind,

  And took no rest, and has no epitaph.

  What hand shall hold the absolute,

  What’s beauty?

  Silent, the echo points to the ladderless mind

  Tumbled with meanings, creeping in foetus thoughts…

  (Out, out, clear words!)

  Genius is grace, is beauty – shall I be less deceived

  Life-long, because of beauty’s printed word?

  And yet – what’s beauty, where?

  Perhaps in eyes, those paths,

  Quick funnels to the complicated pool

  Of the mind. But the thinking eye

  Is blank – cold water-veils

  Proceed above what sunken curious shells,

  What stones, what weed?

  The thinker’s eye a blank – with flowering words

  Back of it waiting, whereas other eyes

  Attend to books, bills, schemes, and how-do-you-do’s,

  Entrench their independence, liberty…

  (O liberty that must be so exactly organised!)

  Brain

  Train

  Of conscious passion,

  Music

  Absolution, sweet abnegation

  Of choice – A palm-grove’s transmigration

  On soft hawaiian strings

  Softly, to languid ballrooms –

  (God grant us appetite for all illusions,

  God grant us ever, as now, the sweet delusions).

  Spring flushes the gardens.

  In season of return bloom the forgotten days

  Thinly; an empty house

  Waits, that has once been mine.

  Spring flushes the gardens –

  Here a road, there a flowering tree,

  And the lonely house

  The lost house, the house bereft,

  Spider-filled, with the hearth ash-laden from the last fire –

  But he that delays here, now an anonymous traveller,

  Stares at the evening silence, and without gesture

  Passes on.

  The sand is scored with print of unknown feet

  Where seas are hollow, tenanted by sound;

  The air is empty save where two wings beat

  In timeless journeying – deep underground

  Brood the eternal things, but in the street

  No whisper comes of these, no word is found.

  See now these berries dark along the hedge

  Hard as black withered blood drawn long ago

  Whose sap is frozen dry; a windy sedge

  Hides field from ashen field, pale lapwings go

  Whining above the heath, and floods are out

  Over the meadows clasped in frigid lace

  Of wintry avenues, ringed and fenced about –

  His life is a place like this, just such a p
lace.

  For him no house, but only empty halls

  To fill with strangers’ voices and short grace

  Of passing laughter, while the shadows’ lace

  Creeps from the fire along dismantled walls,

  Uncertain tapestry of altering moods –

  Only the sunset’s hour, the solitudes

  Of sea and sky, the rain come with the spring;

  Dark winds that gnarl the olive trees, and moan

  Against the shuttered brain that thrills alone

  Each night more racked by its adventuring.

  The sirens then, beyond the ocean’s brim,

  Call, and make ready on their ultimate shore,

  And singing raise their arms, and wait for him,

  Nepenthe rises at the prison door…

  But in what hour, what age

  Are siren voices heard across the water?

  No – instead

  Only bread and rain

  Are on the waters –

  And in the flooded orient

  Dawn

  Unwinds from the edge of a gale,

  Muffled, old-purple.

  Between two hours the dawn runs very surely

  Into a morning March.

  Wild-fowl from the sedge, thrushes are in the dew

  On distant lawns, so you remember…

  Is it the end or beginning,

  Caesura, knot in the time-thread?

  And Paris

  Rolls up the monstrous carpet of its nights,

  Picks back the specks and forms –

  O individual, disparate,

  Where now from the river bank?

  From the Seine, up the Quarter, homeward at last to sleep.

  – Clothes, old clothes –

  early is it, or noon,

  By this alarm clock?

  The rag-man turns the corner –

  For him, past one; just today here in bed.

  So – one begins again?

  so soon preoccupied…

  Who’s ill, tired, contumacious, sour, forswearing

  After last night?

  With wine alone one is allowed to think

  Less cumbrously, and if one may recall

  Little, there’s always tomorrow – when a something sore

  Gropes in the brain – and shall one not condone

  The shame, the doubt of this, the automaton?

  With no particular heartache,

  Only subsiding chords,

  Echoes of transience.

  In adolescence creep the first bitter roots

  Darkly

  To a full rich world –

  The rich bitter fullness, where the play stands

  Without prompter for the love-scene or the anger-scene.

  And… You and I,

  Propelled, controlled by need only,

  Forced by dark appetites;

  Lovers, friends, rivals for a time,

  thinking to choose,

  And having chosen, losing.

  … ‘How long shall we last each other …

  Perhaps a year …

  Omens I do not see …’

  But now we are three together –

  How is it when we three are together

  No rancour comes, but only the tired

  Acceptance, the heart-ache in each heart-beat?

  Full acceptance, beaten out to the very end –

  Life blooms against disaster,

  pressing its new immortal shoots against disaster.

  And one of us questions, and smiles –

  And one of us, smiling, answers with a gesture only –

  And one: – ‘Ah no – the new cannot put out the old –

  Though I clutch on the new I shall not shuffle off the old,

  Wrapped, folded together

  The new burns, ripens in the known,

  Folded, growing together –

  Yes – (even to paradox)

  Have I not loved you better, loving again?’

  Up, down a little world –

  south, north –

  Pale north, dark-hedged; two cities grow and rot there

  Stealthily.

  War’s over, and with it, spring

  That opening blinds let in no more.

  Only the grey

  Habit of days,

  The yawning visits, the forced revisitations.

  Oh very much the same, these faces and places,

  These meals and conversations,

  Custom of being alive, averting of the death-thought.

  But in the charnel-cloister Dupuytren,

  Down a side-street, there’s a full century’s matter

  Collected –

  The death-before-life, the atom in the womb

  Preparing – snarled embryos,

  pinched

  By once-roseate poisons.

  (Frail brown

  Pre-natal dust, what life is it you missed?)

  The skeletons swing on a line,

  Dark-waxed, patined, defective-boned –

  O commemorable fusion of science with disease…

  (That was a new contemplation, the death-museum.)

  Up and down

  On a little track,

  With a lighthouse to end the chapter.

  The sea is glass – slip briefly into France;

  Brown-gold Rhône, slip with me to the other sea

  Where the mimosa flowers

  Ecstatically for moribunds,

  Immensely, in thundering rains.

  Time rings in the weakening pulse, aggressive high –

  Time,

  Time –

  Do you remember:

  A cliff had hidden the wind –

  The fishes came, and the gold-eyed plaintive mongrel

  To snap at cast-off scraps;

  We were talking of mutability –

  (Your eyes dark

  As a sky when the winter sun wearies of it

  Drawing into a cloud.)

  ‘Now at least

  We are forgotten of time, this hour escapes him –

  Where he sits

  In the workshops

  Tying his knots, unravelling,

  Spoiling the work of others –

  He who dramatizes the nights

  Of lovers, and tears fierce words from their insurgent hearts –

  He who sits

  In the taverns, lusty, aloof,

  Condemning, experienced, jealous…

  Milord Eternity –’

  And the seas turn mutable foam, in fear transfusing

  Themselves to the watcher –

  they have nor wish nor choosing,

  But turn, tossing fragments, spars,

  Forever – meridian calms

  Fill these still classic shores with unaccountable voice,

  And in the weeded stones

  The carapace life creeps singly, unafraid.

  ‘– Then I was in a train

  in pale clear country –

  By Genoa at night,

  Where the old palatial banks

  Rise out of vanquished swamps

  Redundant –

  And in San Gimignano’s

  Towers, where Dante once…

  And in the plains, with the mountain’s veil

  Before me and the waterless rivers of stones –

  Siena-brown, with Christ’s head on gold,

  Pinturicchio’s trees on the hill

  In the nostalgic damps, when the maremma’s underworld

  Creeps though at evening.

  Defunct Arezzo, Pisa the forgotten –

  And in Florence

  Benozzo

  With his embroidered princely cavalcades;

  And Signorelli, the austere passion.

  Look – Christ hangs on a sombre mound,

  Magdalen dramatic

  Proclaims the tortured god; the rest have gone

  To a far hill. Very dark it is, soon it will thunder

  From that last rim of a
maranthine sky.

  Life broods at the cross’s foot,

  Lizard, and campion, star-weeds like Parnassus grass,

  And plaited strawberry leaves;

  The lizard inspects a skull,

  You can foretell the worm between the bones.

  (I am alone. Read from this letter

  That I have left you and do not intend to return.)

  …Then I was walking in the mountains,

  And drunk in Cortona, furiously,

  With the black wine rough and sour

  from a Tuscan hill;

  Drunk and silent between the dwarfs and the cripples

  And the military in their intricate capes

  Signed with the Italian star.

  Eleven shuddered in a fly-blown clock.

  O frustrations, discrepancies,

  I had you to myself then!

  To count and examine,

  Carve, trim, pare – and skewer you with words.

  Words…like the stony rivers

  Anguished and dry.

  Words clouding, spoiling, getting between one and the mark,

  Falsely perpetuating – ‘Why he was thus,

  Self-painted, a very personal testimony

  Of half-expression’ – and oh the hypocrisy

  Of the surrender in the written word…

  (Yet taken from this

  The discerning estimate of ‘what you’ve been’ –)

  What now can be remembered that was seen

  Long ago? (always long ago).

  The empty seas, the unpeopled landscape, and the sullen acre

  Trodden out in revolt –

  Associations

  Called in unmerited resurrection

  Of what’s accomplished, dead –

  These, and the chasing of the immortal Question,

  The hunted absolute.

  In the shade of the bitter vine

  I sit, instructed fool and phoenix-growth,

  Ash-from-my-ash that made me, that I made

  Myself in the folded curve of Origin –

  Heredities disclaim, will not explain

  All prior mischiefs in the bone, the brain –

  Only a ponderous mirror holds

  The eyes that look deep and see but the eyes again.

  One for another

  I have changed my prisons;

  Held fast, as the flame stands, locked in the prism –

  And at one end I see

  Beauty of other times, mirage of old beauty

  Down a long road, clear of the strands and patches of

  associations,

  Keen, resurrected, very clear –

  – And at one side

  The symbol of the vacant crossroads,

  Then the veiled figure waiting at the crossroads

  Leaning against the wind, urging, delaying…

  (I have come for you, Peer!)

 

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