Selected Poems

by Cunard, Nancy; Parmar, Sandeep;

  Of Poiret: red, gold with cascading white tulle on the hips.

  The P. of W. was there (so polite, lovely face) and we danced together;

  The hostess, that small termagent, in all her glitterings,

  Brilliant was she, the hostess, at this sort of thing.

  Bored by it all was I. After many dances we went down

  Alone, by the grand staircase to the supper room.

  It was then; Eliot, you came in, alone too, for the first time to my eyes;

  Well-advised of you was I, already somewhat versed in you:

  I mean Prufrock.

  This Prufrock of yours, in 1917,

  Was given to me by an Irish officer.

  I think he had the stamp of the poet too,

  Else would he have loved it so well? From that day on,

  He (my first lover since marriage) and you came together…

  Gratuitous, fortuitious, this linking, one well may say.

  Such things make a ‘complex’. It is magic.

  Thank you, Eliot. It lasted what I, in life, have had to call ‘a long time’;

  The lover, in Flanders fighting till he was killed there: 9 months.

  Prufrock remained, with its sayings, those then my dirge.

  In all, your Prufrock, it got into my fibre,

  Not only because of itself but because, of the way it came to me.

  I never told you this, oh never, never.

  Seized was I by your looks, your way, your eyes, at that ball:

  ‘The solitary eagle’, I said, ‘that is it, that is you.’

  We were alone in that vainglorious room,

  Both of us thinking ‘Much can be talked about,

  It seems.’ And so it was, despite others coming in,

  For perhaps two hours on end and maybe more,

  About, about, what about? Nor you, nor I

  Could now recall – champagne and lobster well to hand.

  So entranced was I by you I suggested ‘a tryst’

  For the next night. You certainly came to it.

  Restaurant Eiffel Tower, Percy Street, London in what was known as The Wyndham Lewis Room

  Tough the painting there was all by ‘Bobbie Roberts’.

  You, pale, restrained, impassive – I suppose these could be three words.

  We had been invited to dinner, both, by the Hutchinsons;

  I begged you not to get us there, and in the end I won.

  So, by the little gas fire, on the floor, we lengthily sat.

  Our talk, it seemed to be going on so long,

  That Joe, the Tower’s Austrian waiter, came up to see,

  Found us by that heat (cold evening) as close as could be:

  ‘Want anything?’ said Joe, smiling at me.

  ‘More gin, Joe, please, make it doubles same as before.’

  Eliot went on talking while I admired his gradual unthawing.

  What can we have talked about so concentratedly?

  Metaphysics? Psychology? The hither-and-yons of life?

  Sitting on that small floor, imbibing Gin-Philosophy… Not Gin-Philosophy only.

  Of the dinner itself I remember nothing at all,

  Save that we two were there, and just we two.

  (Do you remember everything that’s happened to you?) And then?

  Not every life-moment’s recalled, though all of that night certainly is…

  Not every moment goes into one’s histories,

  Be they written, or even, spoken.

  Ara Vos Prec – Then The Waste Land

  It put its rightful frenzy into me.

  I do not understand it yet, nor ever shall

  Reach its full import, its span, its entirety.

  (For one who’s obtuse, most times, and that is me,

  Count me well in.)

  It changed, however, my life in its own time,

  As it has changed the lives of poets in many lands.

  Indeed, I am one of these too.

  Is it passion and repression, repression as well as passion?

  Yourself, aureoled with visions and with echoes,

  That is clear, and also with chosen, well-tried allusions,

  But the soul of it all is a mystery to me.

  So be it. See, Eliot, how not fully understanding, one can love a thing,

  Full far from one’s own ways, yet the ‘self-of-it’ held close?

  But why repressions?

  This sort of thing, maybe, we talked about, so close to that good gas fire,

  I think I must have said: ‘But why repressions?’

  This was some time before The Waste Land came out.

  Ah, you’re a great poet – no mistake about that whatever;

  Your progressions, digressions, and the kiss of rhyme on rhyme,

  Sure technique, the slopings of metre into metre,

  The ferryings from rhythm to rhythm.

  I do not think you are a ‘depressive’ poet, Eliot,

  Nor that you were ever an ‘encouraging’ poet either,

  Save because of the very beauty of your lines.

  But what’s ‘Encouragement’? No rising poet needs that in mind:

  Find out for himself he will, the stuff of his own kind.

  Great is my love for The Waste Land: for those ‘Terres en Friche’,

  Or do you prefer ‘Terre de Friche’, or, even, ‘Terrains Vagues’?

  ‘Die Wüste’ in German. ‘La Yerma’, that is in Spanish…

  Whichever, great gold is there, throughout all of it.

  Straw Men, as well. With, also, your Gerontion.

  And here, I stop. He dicho. I have done.

  (Save to salute you, from distance across the years…

  Who should look for the obvious rhyme that could follow here: Tears?)

  Lincoln

  ‘My paramount object is to save the Union, and not to either save or destroy slavery.’

  ‘If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. And if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others along, I would also do that.’ (From a letter to Horace Greely, 1862)

  ‘I can now most solemnly assert that I did all in my judgement that could be done to restore the Union without interfering with the institution of slavery. We failed, and the blow at slavery was struck!’ (From ‘Life, Public Services and State Papers of Abraham Lincoln’.)

  If I could free the Union… so it went

  Down Lincoln’s pen… I’d free the slaves, yet not

  For their but Union’s sake, if freeing meant

  The Union be kept whole; again, I’d not

  Agree to freeing if that saved the Union;

  Third plan: free some, leave others as they are

  To save… Thus straddled in perplexed communion

  He spawned his insult ‘free’. They put bar

  Before, behind, longsides, athwart the black

  In reassertion of his branded back,

  And Lincoln’s grinding verbiage dressed that lie

  From then till Lenin, and the black man said

  Nuthin’ or handled death – until our cry:

  ‘My love, my friend, my comrade – black on red.’

  The Love Story

  The time for fairy-tales is past; secure

  The latch was shut on children’s dreams, but one

  Escaped, and daring fled into the world,

  Where growing magically men called it Love.

  In secret hurrying through the troubled nights,

  Like feverish criminals that fear pursuit,

  We hide the gold of our discovery,

  Trembling to look on it. Ah, where shall be

  Time for the heart to rest and hands to hold

  Untrembling all the treasure, breath be found

  To conjure into life this stolen gain

  And clasp it, willing fellow, to our joy?

  The shining bird that will not be constrained


  Nor tamed with dazzling toys, the lightning flame

  That strikes and shatters, the fiery paradox

  That burns the soul into sobbing sea

  When all is done and the sweet story fled –

  Then grow we old and weary of all tales.

  ¿Me Oyes, Mijito?

  To Arturo Gardoqui

  Una noche del Amaya

  With the beefsteak on its plate,

  And the Araucano ripe, round, and gorgeous – the Indian fast on the setting sun –

  Una noche del Amaya, (¿Donde mi hombre, donde mi hombre?)

  Una noche del Amaya

  Between the drinks and the scorn and the drunken,

  The peppery piece and hand stretched to tear your cap off…

  Ah how they come and go here (¿but adonde mi hombre?)

  Una noche del Amaya – what am I trying to say?

  ‘They believe in the heart in Chile, believe in using it’

  Someone opined, and I looked at my plate,

  Saw a heart there – mine, I think – said ‘I will eat it’,

  And eating it ‘¿Donde mi hombre, donde mi hombre?’

  Temper is free in Chile, at least there is that,

  And so, you Celts of many lands, this is the place for you.

  Vital and total extremes are in honour in Chile,

  Not only in honour but practised… (but ¿adonde mi hombre?)

  I continue to eat my heart; it has gone cold on the plat,

  And I remember: temper is incidental here, if accidental…

  The world over

  Men sleep under bridges,

  Men in the once-sined shoe, men in the Stetson hat;

  But here my lover sleeps ‘not even under bridges’,

  Sleeps full of wine, poems and ire (Ah ¿adonde mi hombre?)

  And I, why am I here and not under those ‘not even bridges’,

  Why am I here? Would I were there at this hour.

  Under a bridge, is it? Also beyond the waters of firmament,

  There dwells my man (for a flood to tell it as quake has told it).

  The heart, the heart on the plate, after it turns tough and cold,

  After you’ve ate of it fills again, grows never too old –

  But whose? Ay that’s the question.

  Will you come and eat a cut of heart with me,

  Drunkard, my drunkard? We can sit down to a good piece of it, you and I,

  Sleep all the sweeter after ‘under the bridges’, mijito…

  Oh let us go

  From the Amayan fumes to a Solutrian silence,

  To where the secular Phoebus spends his rays

  Playing at God yet where the Indians laid

  Stone upon century; I would like such days

  With you between those ruins, before all gets waylaid.

  Having gold I place it upon my knee;

  I thread my gold, and then my gold leaves me.

  (Coming out of sleep with these lines)

  Mosley 1943

  Fascism incarnate, Britain’s. This

  Is Mosley, undenied, forthright,

  And out of jail. This paradox

  Invites three million men to fight.

  How will it work, this non-pareil

  Of treachery? Though your tacking’s right,

  You’ll need Excalibur, Morrison,

  To prick three million souls to fight.

  Should we invoke our allies’ shock?

  Ay, but its first the Briton’s right:

  Aren’t we enough to ask if you

  Dare ask three millions hearts to fight?

  Does not the Army say ‘Thumbs down’,

  And Air and Sea shout back the same?

  What say the dead? Safe dead they jeer

  ‘For this we fought, to save this game!’

  And all of us, with plough or pen,

  That win the coal or fish the sea,

  Or drive the lathes must feel Down tools…

  D’you really want such things to be?

  Down tools? No, for that’s Hitler’s wish.

  This is our war, nor shall we fail

  If every factory hammer rings:

  Mosley must go back to jail.

  Thank you: folks sleep in Tube tonight

  Because of Mosley’s master’s way.

  How many more will sleep in camps

  All concentrate, come Mosley’s day?

  The people’s instinct does not fail,

  And back of instinct in this case

  The proofs are shored since ’31

  Of Mosley beastly acts, and face.

  Have you forgot Olympia and

  Black Sunday in hot ripe East End?

  Prove black is white, you’d have to, as

  When Mosley says he’s ‘Britain’s friend’.

  We are a true and honest race,

  Able, not stupid, generous, brave,

  When men like you will let us be:

  Can you make hero mate to knave?

  Can you deny heroes exist

  And martyrs too, since that first day?

  But this is a very dirty war

  If you can swing things in this way.

  I know, you’ll say: ‘The premise? False.

  We think of future moves; it’s chess;

  Mosley is unimportant, to…’

  Official angle on this mess.

  All this, far more than straw in wind

  Suggests the kind of peace ahead,

  And yet, remember: cup-lip-slip…

  May Britain be worthy of her dead.

  Myself

  I am alone,

  Sitting in the proverbial deserted country

  Unmoved by this recurrent fantasmagoria

  Of public holidays – here in this early August

  Antagonised by life, not to be drawn

  From the secluded alchemy

  Of contemplation. True, there have been many hours

  When I have longed for wine and with it those conversations

  Reverting to the metaphysical, a lure

  That sets the mind on the old pinnacle

  Which I have likened to the balancing

  Of jugglers’ knives – but that is past,

  And what is past is vastly better to me

  Than the florescence of some banal future

  I cannot govern.

  Here am I

  Today in my sundress, smiling, obstinate,

  And I am reading seriously – how Mme de Stael

  Thought that the human race was capable of perfection

  And disagreeing with her – (for we have all ideas

  Founded on various things about perfection).

  Reading how Mme de Stael liked politics

  And was romantic all through the Revolution.

  Here the wind blows and cigarettes are mingled

  Through the long day with vagrant meditations;

  The garden is full of green apples

  That I shall never pick. In the evening

  I lie in a large field and think of Africa

  Teeming with animals, dream of its spaces and mysteries,

  Later return unhaunted

  By the day into the creaking, haunted house.

  I am alone and careless, sometimes troubled

  By a strange dream of shipwrecks where the sea

  Has swallowed legions, bearing me up

  On a wave of salt, I disconcerted

  By this strange, deferential trick of fate,

  A solitary survivor.

  ‘Et je suis veule…’

  forbidding phrases

  Fall through the mind like the fall of the green, hard apples,

  And the grey garden is empty of flowers. These synonyms

  I have not looked for but were pressed on me,

  I the tramp of London knowing all the night-watches,

  Now dreaming for pleasure to come out of the month of August

  Once back in the spotted country, pleasure mingled
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  With the tossing of grasses, the flush of the harvested hay crops,

  The wink of a daisy when my guests depart through the wicket.

  (Guests of a moment) so that I may return

  To the perusal of the French language and lesser poetry.

  These hours pass nameless and unperceived; meanwhile

  In the offing swings a purple buddleia

  Flicking away the propositions of the future.

  And an Afternoon

  Sitting in Lyons, sitting in Lyons,

  Lyons is London, Lyons is not the world,

  Is London Lyons? London is not the world…

  Tra-ra, light-headed a little, in a little Lyons.

  I feel as if Greater Time Street were round this corner

  Leading to a Place called ‘World’, la Place du Monde.

  It has a guillotine in the centre and may do a long time yet.

  Do you wait to get there from here, and is it possible, and who are we?

  ‘I think I’ll love you, Morris, till I die’

  (And when is that, and what is ‘love’, and who are you?

  Tra-ra, a little ligh-headed.)

  Tomorrow we will have music; tomorrow, my Morris,

  Shake the old nebulae out of Time’s windy sack,

  But today let me sit in silence, as in all those 4 AMs one sat

  In Montmartre, between music and daylight suspended,

  Wondering about ‘meaning’, well away in that labyrinth with echoes for guides…

  No, London is not Lyons – or else I am not alive…

  I’ll ever love you if I loved you ever –

  This was a moment between snow and tea, and I

  A hand on a pencil moving, eye half shut…

  And Lyons: Self-Service, Take Your Tray, Move On:

  At six PM it closes.

  Oh fierce and sharp and sweet

  The great, plain wind outside, telling the traveller,