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,
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
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