Divides us now, and the Italian sky
That closes down abruptly on its sunset of six o’clock,
Without lamps in this cold October.
Is England sober,
Clad in its sullen winter moods already,
Or sitting expansively
At the tables in warmed intoxication?
And do you still contemplate
The varying destiny
Of the clients that always must return
To the Tower’s beacon, to the Tower’s cheer?
Small fry and gros bonnets.
I think the Tower shall go up to heaven
One night in a flame of fire, about eleven.
I always saw our carnal-spiritual home
Blazing upon the sky symbolically…
If ever we go to heaven in a troop
The Tower must be our ladder,
Vertically
Climbing the ether with its swaying group.
God will delight to greet this embassy
Wherein is found no lack
Of wits and glamour, strong wines, new foods, fine looks,
strange-sounding languages of diverse men –
Stulik shall lead the pack
Until its great disintegration, when
God sets us deftly in a new Zodiac.
I Am Not One for Expression
I am not one for expression;
The fish leaps in the stream,
The bird rends the air sharply,
But I linger as if underground
In a web of escaping thoughts.
I have laughed,
Applauded, marvelled, thrilled at others’ emotion –
After these what is left in my hand tomorrow but the feel of a vanished leaf?
(As the sleeper waking from his treasure-dream holds not even a palm-full of dust.)
You that write,
Having had in your grasp
Men’s hearts and words, love, and the earth’s intensities –
Even those that boasted of such, upstarts in a penny town,
And the few
That know content, having half-realised
Themselves in a line or two of eternity;
And you to whom all life
Is ripe with fulfilment or dim with unfulfilment,
Now at the end of your fruition –
All of you
Had keys to expression, went up and opened the doors
On glamour, romance, and soul’s philosophy;
Set free a running mood,
Put lances in the clutch of your heroes,
Raised them on mountain crests for all to see –
I have no wealth
In the currency of your riches.
I am the pilgrim of lost paths,
The gleaner in the empty harvest field
That others have plucked before I came to it.
Out in the world for a season
I will travel with its pedlars
Learning from them maybe to pick at other trades,
Making a semblance –
Till I sit again, aloof
Like a cross-legged tailor stitching in his small shop,
Handling thoughts that are the ghosts of deeds,
(Ghosts and precursors)
Hammering cold words
On ill-shaped anvils.
To I. T. and T. W. E.
But one or two of us go hand in hand,
You, adolescent, and you the unexpressed
That wear uncertainty upon your breast
Like a flower of many moods, and understand
All things from tasting all the hot wines of life.
We seem so heedless, with only shadows for friends
Along the highway’s desert, till fate sends
An unexpected partisan, that the rife
Ranklings of solitude be stilled anew.
You adolescent, the truant to all schools,
Life will not burn, you hold aloft the rules
Of conduct, as you hastily pass through
Those rooms where yet I watch uncertainty
Lifting its torch to light our destiny.
‘Les Jeunes’
Tels que de blancs agneaux sagraces ces deux frères
Parcourent le Continent,
Auréolés de feutres noirs, le livre sous le bras,
Leurs rires sont les mêmes.
Toujours blonds et roses ils sément les paroles,
L’un moqueur naïf – l’autre comme un prètre,
Dont le regard fuyant serait la soutane de sa pensée
Pour servir les mots satiriques aux nouvelles ouailles…
Je les ai vu ainsi en maints cafés,
Récolteurs éditant l’esprit – toujours debout,
De temps en temps
Un épigramme est serré pour la famille –
Car, là-bas dans le brumes anglaises,
Il y a une soeur qui broie idées d’étrange couleurs,
Trictant son fil poétique
Enchevetré
Dans des rouages de natures mécaniques,
De paysages empaillés,
De spleen pour les gens de province…
Il y a une mère, un père,
(Grand Barberousse) qu’on dit être un avare.
* * * * * *
En leur palais de Florence je les vois cherchant querelle aux fleurs;
Disant: douze ballons d’enfant vaudraient mieux près de notre fontaine –
Et d’une chiquenaude décapitant quelques primevers,
L’un sort pour l’achat d’un verre second-empire dont l’autre se souvient.
Crepuscule Sentimentale
A lumière d’or sur l’eau…
Elle ne cache rien,
Ou bien
Si tu veux elle
Cache des promesses, des choses jurées
A Dieu.
Trouves-lui un symbole
Et elle existera
En d’autres termes, crée
Par toi en paroles.
Ce n’est que la lumière
De cette taverne, reflétée
Sur les eaux proches et mutables
D’un des canaux de Venise;
Elle demeure
Stable, instable
Après le bateau qui s’élance –
A cette heure
Me vient une nostalgie de la France,
Des feuilles tombées aux boulevards, et des pleurs
Qu’on y a dans une petite ivresse de vin
Couvant les souvenirs, harçelé de ‘trop tard’
Qui remettrait toujours,
Toujours le geste sommaire du lendemain –
Mais içi, dans une heure,
Se prépare la vraie nuit
Pour manger, dormir, aimer…
Paris est loin.
Attablé
Je te vois, avec des autres
Aux gestes vifs, aux frêles mains
Qui expriment l’Orient et vantent l’Amérique, venus à Paris
De partout, aux ‘Autels de l’Art’ –
(Je n’ai jamais connu de Saint
Mais ai vu maints apôtres
Se suivre dans le sentier de leur espoir.)
La lumière se tord sur l’eau,
Ce n’est plus la flamme de l’auberge,
Ne lui donnes pas de symbole –
Ce n’est rien, pas même l’épave
D’un souvenir.
Pleures pour moi ce soir
Avec l’ivresse du vin –
Vas au Boulevard,
Vas à la foire d’automne,
Et sur le tard quand tout se ferme
Je t’aurai vu, grave,
Auréolé de chant de l’avenir.
Opium
Fumerie –
Si j’avais boudé Dieu, ce dieu de l’extrème orient
Que je vois reflété dans les songes que je balançe,
Si je l’avais nargué –
Que d’étranges moqueries
Ne m’aurait-il soufflé au lieu de songe qui me revient
D’une heure très lointaine, finie, outretombe –
Mais je l’ai acceuilli,
Tel les réveurs qui retrouvent l’amante perdue,
Et la bercent un instant à leur Coeur inassouvi…
Ah fumée,
Un éternal conseil de la destinée,
Vais-je le saisir en votre luminosité souveraine?
Les Masques
J’ai revu tous les yeux des multitudes quittées,
Et le fil de lune triste dans ma chamber au retour
Prés des tulipes écloses en ce printemps féroce –
Lumière d’insomnie, veilleuse palpitante
Qui voyage sans arrêt ou les masques pendent au mur
Et me guettent mollement de leur coin des cieux.
Ils me dirent – Là-bas on vous attend toujours,
Sachant que jamias vous ne nous appartiendrez.
Ce soir, sur les voix russes et les chansons,
Il pleuvait – gotte à goutte les rires s’en allaient
Cherchant un asile dans la foule multicolore;
Les voix déferlaient comme des vagues dans un port
Ou balancent restraintes les naçelles éveillées.
J’étais une barque inconnue, une de celles
Filant parmi les autres, inapperçue,
Muette et sans lumière, qui n’attent aucune brise
Ni le réveil du jour – elle n’a jamais eu d’heure
Exacte ou elle reprend sa destinée.
Les rires s’en allaient, je n’ai pensé à rien
Hors les yeux que je vois et qui ne me regardent plus.
L’aube d’une rue solitaire m’a tenu compagnie,
Et chez moi les masques réveillés, placides, pendus,
Cruçifiés ecstatiques que j’avais aligné,
Pleurent et sourient comme aux temps écoulés.
Ils me voient du même regard quand je découvrais l’aurore
Par leurs yeux inlassables, blémis, incolores,
Sans plaintes et paroles ils sont gais dans le vide –
‘Maitre’… diraient-ils – je les préfère au monde entier,
Barques de mes songes, équipages d’aventures
Indéfinissables, inachevés.
Parallax
1925
Parallax
‘Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper being.’
Sir Thomas Browne
He would have every milestone back of him,
The seas explored, clouds, winds, and stars encompassed,
All separate moods unwrapped, made clear –
Tapping of brains, inquisitive tasting of hearts,
Provisioning of various appetite.
Midnights have heard the wine’s philosophy
Spill from glass he holds, defiant tomorrows
Pushed back.
His credo threads
Doubt with belief, questions the ultimate grace
That shall explain, atoning.
A candle drips beside the nocturnal score –
Dawns move along the city’s line reflecting,
Stare through his rented casement.
Earth, earth with consuming breast,
Across its ruined waste, its torturous acre
Draws out his complex fires, drives on his feet
Behind imperious rain, and multiplies
The urges, questions in the wilderness.
All roads that circle back – he shall tread these
And know the mirage in the desert’s eyes
The desert’s voices wait.
This clouded fool,
This poet-fool must halt in every tavern
Observing the crusty wrecks of aftermath,
Plied by his dual mood – uneasy, still –
Devouring fever of bone transfused to brain,
In that exact alembic burned away,
Made rare, perpetual.
Come music,
In a clear vernal month
Outside the window sighing in a lane,
With trysts by appletrees –
Moths drift in the room,
Measure with running feet the book he reads.
The month is golden to all ripening seeds;
Long dawns, suspended twilight by a sea
Of slow transition, halting at full ebb;
Midnight, aurora, daytime, all in one key –
The whispering hour before a storm, the treacherous hour
Breaking –
So wake, wind’s fever, branches delirious
Against a riven sky.
All houses are too small now,
A thought outgrows a brain –
Open the doors, the skeleton must pass
Into the night.
In rags and dust, haunted, irresolute,
Its passion cuts new furrows athwart the years.
Sorrow, my sister –
yet who accepts
At once her tragic hand?
From pitiless explorations
Come the unwarrantable deeds,
The over-proved frustrations.
O vulgar lures of a curl!
Tricks, catches, nimble-fingered ruffian adolescence
Whose beauty pulls
The will to fragments –
Young beauty in a raffish mood,
Love to be sold,
Lily and pleasant rose,
Street lily, alley rose,
For all Love-to-be-sold, who will not buy?
Rose, gold – and flush of peach
(Never by the sun formed),
Bloom-dust off gala moon
In restaurants,
Cupid of crimson lamps –
His cassolette
Steams through the coy reiterative tune
Nightlong.
Oh come, this barbed rosette
(Or perhaps spangle
From champagne)
Drops off once out the exit-door –
Or how many thousand prodigal francs
From serious patriarchal banks
Must build the card-house for this ‘Grand Armour’?
Sour grapes of reason’s vine
Perfecting, hang on that symbolic house,
And passion is a copious mine
No matter how stripped it’s always full – carouse
Then, cytherean, with the cursory false love
That has his bed
Gold-lined, and robs you, host that are too fond –
Cold, cold,
Mind’s acid gales arouse the sated old
Fool that was gulled by love and paid his bond –
Young love is dead.
‘I that am seed, root and kernel-stone
Buried in the present, I that exact fulfilment from every hour
Now tell you:
Accept all things, accept – if only to be aware.
Understand, no choice is granted,
Nor the prudent craving, nor the ultimate romance –
But the unalterable deed, the mystic and positive
Stands, monumental against the astonished sky
Of an inquisitive world.
Now fierce, now cold,
Time beats in the hours, threatens from smoky ruins –
And yet to whom the loss
If one be made the sempiternal fool
Of chance,
Muddied with temporary growth of love’s importunate weeds?
‘In the penumbra
Of the wilderness,
On the rim of the tide along Commercial street
You meet one like you for an hour or two –
But eventual sameness creeps to repossess
All eyes, supplicant, offering unusable fidelities;
Eyes of defiance sulking into assent,
Acute
with repetition, aged by a stale demand…
Though I did mark the turn of every hand
In the beginning, tendered my respect
To ante-rooms, while the sand ran from the hours.
‘Think now how friends grow old –
Their diverse brains, hearts, faces, modify;
Each candle wasting at both ends, the sly
Disguise of its treacherous flame…
Am I the same?
Or a vagrant, of other breed, gone further, lost –
I am most surely at the beginning yet.
If so, contemporaries, what have you done?
We chose a different game –
But all have touched the same desires
Receded now to oblivion – as a once-lustrous chain
Hangs in the window of the antiquary,
Dry bric-à-brac, time-dulled,
That the eventual customer must buy…
(Tomorrow’s child)’
Sunday’s bell
Rings in the street. An old figure
Grins – (why notice the old,
The scabrous old that creep from night to night
Bringing their poor drama of blenched faces and fearful hands
That beg?)
Two old women drinking on a cellar floor
Huddled, with a beerish look at the scavenging rat –
A fur-collared decrepitude peers
From tattered eyelids
That shrivel malignant before an answering stare –
Old men in the civic chariots
Parade with muffled protestations,
Derelicts spit on the young,
Oh symbol, symbol,
Indecorous age and cadence of christian bell.
This thin edge of December
Wears out meagrely in the
Cold muds, rains, intolerable nauseas of the street.
Closed doors, where are your keys?
Closed hearts, does your embitteredness endure forever?
Torpidly
Afternoon settles on the town,
each hour long as a street –
In the rooms
A sombre carpet broods, stagnates beneath deliberate steps:
Here drag a foot, there a foot, drop sighs, look round for nothing, shiver.
Sunday creeps in silence
Under suspended smoke,
And curdles defiant in unreal sleep.
The gas-fire puffs, consumes, ticks out its minor chords –
And at the door
I guess the arrested knuckles of the one-time friend,