For tomorrow! Not yet! Above our foreheads
will break – death’s sea of – memories!
For tomorrow, when we shall realise!
That sound what? as if someone were
crying just nearby? Can that be it?
The mountain is mourning. Because we must go down
separately, over such mud,
into life which we all know is nothing but
mob market barracks:
That sound said: all poems of
mountains are written thus
8
Hump of Atlas, groaning
Titan, this town where we
live, day in, day out, will come
to take a pride in the mountain
where we defeated life – at cards, and
insisted with passion not to
exist. Like a bear-pit.
And the twelve apostles.
Pay homage to my dark cave,
(I was a cave that the waves entered).
The last hand of the card game was
played, you remember, at the edge of the suburb?
Mountain many worlds the
gods take revenge on their own likeness!
And my grief began with this mountain
which sits above me now like my headstone.
9
Years will pass. And then the inscribed
slab will be changed for tombstone and removed.
There will be summerhouses on our mountain.
Soon it will be hemmed in with gardens,
because in outskirts like this they say
the air is better, and it’s easier to live:
so it will be cut into plots of land,
and many lines of scaffolding will cross it.
They will straighten my mountain passes.
All my ravines will be upended.
There must be people who want to bring happiness
into their home, to have happiness.
Happiness at home! Love without fiction.
Imagine: without any stretching of sinews.
I have to be a woman to endure this!
(There was happiness – when you used to come,
happiness – in my home.) Love without any extra
sweetness given by parting. Or a knife.
Now on the ruins of our happiness
a town will grow: of husbands and wives.
And in that blessed air, while
you can, everyone should sin –
soon shopkeepers on holidays
will be chewing the cud of their profits,
thinking out new levels and corridors, as
everything leads them back to their house!
For there has to be someone who needs
a roof with a stork’s nest!
10
Yet under the weight of these foundations
the mountain will not forget the game.
Though people go astray they must remember.
And the mountain has mountains of time.
Obstinate crevices and cracks remain;
in summer homes, they’ll realise, too late,
this is no hill, overgrown with families, but
a volcano! Make money out of that!
Can vineyards ever hold the danger
of Vesuvius? A giant without fear cannot
be bound with flax. And the delirium
of lips alone has the same power:
to make the vineyards stir and turn heavily,
to belch out their lava of hate.
Your daughters shall all become prostitutes
and all your sons turn into poets!
You shall rear a bastard child, my daughter!
Waste your flesh upon the gypsies, son!
May you never own a piece of fertile land
you who take your substance from my blood.
Harder than any cornerstone, as
binding as the words of a dying man,
I curse you: do not look for happiness
upon my mountain where you move like ants!
At some hour unforeseen, some time unknowable,
you will realise, the whole lot of you, how
enormous and without measure is
the mountain of God’s seventh law.
Epilogue
There are blanks in memory cataracts
on our eyes; the seven veils.
I no longer remember you separately
as a face but a white emptiness
without true features. All – is a
whiteness. (My spirit is one
uninterrupted wound.) The chalk of
details must belong to tailors!
The dome of heaven was built in a single frame
and oceans are featureless a mass of
drops that cannot be distinguished. You
are unique. And love is no detective.
Let now some neighbour say whether your
hair is black or fair, for he can tell.
I leave that to physicians or watchmakers.
What passion has a use for such details?
whirlwind or wholly turned to stone.
I cannot think of you apart from
love. There is an equals sign.
(In heaps of sleepy down, and falls of
water, hills of foam, there is
a new sound, strange to my hearing,
instead of I a regal we)
and though life’s beggared now and
narrowed into how things are
still I cannot see you joined to
anyone: a
revenge of memory.
finished 1 December 1924
POEM OF THE END
1
A single post, a point of rusting
tin in the sky
marks the fated place we
move to, he and I
on time as death is
prompt strangely
too smooth the gesture of
his hat to me
menace at the edges of his
eyes his mouth tight
shut strangely too low is the
bow he makes tonight
on time? that false note in
his voice, what
is it the brain alerts to and the
heart drops at?
under that evil sky, that sign of
tin and rust,
Six o’clock. There he is waiting
by the post.
Now we kiss soundlessly, his
lips stiff as
hands are given to queens, or
dead people thus
round us the shoving elbows of
ordinary bustle
and strangely irksome rises the
screech of a whistle
howls like a dog screaming
angrier, longer: what
a nightmare strangeness life is
at death point
and that nightmare reached my waist
only last night
and now reaches the stars, it has
grown to its true height
crying silently love love until
– Has it gone
six, shall we go to the cinema?
I shout it: home!
2
And what have we come to?
tents of nomads
thunder and drawn swords over
our heads, some
terror we expect
listen houses
collapsing in the one
word: home.
It is the whine of a cossetted
child lost, it is the
noise a baby makes for
give and mine.
Brother in dissipation, cause
of this cold fever, you
hurry now to get home just
as men rush in leaving
like a horse jerking the
line rope down in the dust.
Is there even a building there?
Ten steps before us.
A house on the hill no higher a
house on the top of the hill and
a window under the roof is it
from the red sun alone
it is burning? or is it my life
which must begin again? how
simple poems are: it means I
must go out into the night
and talk to
who shall I tell my sorrow
my horror greener than ice?
– You’ve been thinking too much.
A solemn answer: yes.
3
And the embankment I hold
to water thick and solid as
if we had come to the hanging
gardens of Semiramis
to water a strip as colourless
as a slab for corpses
I am like a female singer holding
to her music. To this wall.
Blindly for you won’t return
or listen, even if I bend to
the quencher of all thirst, I am
hanging at the gutter of a roof.
Lunatic. It is not the river
(I was born naiad) that makes me
shiver now, she was a hand I held
to, when you walked beside me, a lover
and faithful.
The dead are faithful
though not to all in their cells; if
death lies on my left now,
it is at your side I feel it.
Now a shaft of astonishing light, and
laughter that cheap tambourine.
– You and I must have a talk. And
I shiver: let’s be brave, shall we?
4
A blonde mist, a wave of
gauze ruffles, of human
breathing, smoky exhalations
endless talk the smell of
what? of haste and filth
connivance shabby acts all
the secrets of business men
and ballroom powder.
Family men like bachelors
move in their rings like middle-aged boys
always joking always laughing, and
calculating, always calculating
large deals and little ones, they are
snout-deep in the feathers of some
business arrangement
and ballroom powder.
(I am half-turned away is this
our house? I am not mistress here)
Someone over his cheque book
another bends to a kid glove
a third works at a delicate foot
in patent leather furtively the smell
rises of marriage-broking
and ballroom powder.
In the window is the silver
bite of a tooth: it is the Star of Malta,
which is the sign of stroking, of the love
that leads to pawing and to pinching.
(Yesterday’s food perhaps but
nobody worries if it smells slightly)
of dirt, commercial tricks
and ballroom powder.
The chain is too short perhaps even
if it is not steel but platinum?
Look how their three chins shake
like cows munching their own veal
above their sugared necks
the devils swing on a gas lamp
smelling of business slumps
and another powder
made by Berthold Schwartz
genius
intercessor for people:
– You and I must have a talk
– Let’s be brave, shall we?
5
I catch a movement of his
lips, but he won’t
speak – You don’t love me?
– Yes, but in torment
drained and driven to death
(He looks round like an eagle)
– You call this home? That’s
in the heart. – What literature!
Love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table
a snatched hour and back home again
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is…
– A shrine?
– or else a scar.
A scar every servant and guest
can see (and I think silently:
love is a bow-string pulled
back to the point of breaking).
Love is a bond. That has snapped for
us our mouths and lives part
(I begged you not to put a
spell on me that holy hour
close on mountain heights of
passion memory is mist).
Yes, love is a matter of gifts
thrown in the fire, for nothing
The shellfish crack of his mouth
is pale, no chance of a smile:
– Love is a large bed.
– Or else an empty gulf.
Now his fingers begin to
beat, no mountains
move. Love is –
– Mine: yes.
I understand. And so?
The drum beat of his fingers
grows (scaffold and square)
– Let’s go, he says. For me, let’s
die, would be easier.
Enough cheap stuff rhymes
like railway hotel rooms, so:
– love means life although
the ancients had a different
name.
– Well?
– A scrap
of handkerchief in a fist
like a fish. – Shall we go? – How,
bullet rail poison
death anyway, choose! I make no
plans. A Roman, you
survey the men still alive
like an eagle:
Let’s say goodbye.
6
I didn’t want this, not
this (but listen, quietly,
to want is what bodies do
and now we are ghosts only).
And yet I didn’t say it
though the time of the train is set
and the sorrowful honour of leaving
is a cup given to women
or perhaps in madness I
misheard you polite liar:
is this the bouquet that you give your
love, this blood-stained honour?
Is it? Sound follows
sound clearly: was it goodbye
you said? (as sweetly casual
as a handkerchief dropped without
thought) in this battle
you are Caesar (What an
insolent thrust, to put the
weapon of defeat, into my hand
like a trophy). It continues. To
sound in my ears. As I bow.
– Do you always pretend
to be forestalled in breaking?
Don’t deny this, it
is a vengeance of Lovelace,
a gesture that does you credit
while it lifts the flesh
from my bones. Laughter the laugh of
death. Moving. Without desire.
That is for others now
we are shadows to one another.
Hammer the last nail in
screw up the lead coffin.
– And now a last request.
– Of course. – Then say nothing
about us to those who will
come after me. (The sick
on their stretchers talk of spring.)
– May I ask the same thing?
– Perhaps I should give you a ring?
– No. Your look is no longer open.
The stamp left on your heart
would be the ring on your hand
So now without any scenes
I must swallow, silently, furtively.
– A book then? – No, you give
those
to everyone, don’t even write them
books…
So now must be no
so now must be no
must be no crying
In wandering tribes of
fishermen brothers
drink without crying
dance without crying
their blood is hot, they
pay without crying
pearls in a glass
melt, as they run their
world without crying
Now I am going and this
Harlequin gives his
Pierrette a bone like
a piece of contempt
He throws her the honour
of ending the curtain, the last
word when one inch of lead in
the breast would be hotter and better
Cleaner. My teeth
press my lips. I can
stop myself crying
pressing the sharpness
into the softest
so without crying
so tribes of nomads
die without crying
burn without crying.
So tribes of fishermen
in ash and song can
hide their dead man.
7
And the embankment. The last one.
Finished. Separate, and hands apart
like neighbours avoiding one another. We