Come after them in the scale

  Of the material and the beautiful;

  Are not less complex but less delicate

  And less important than these living

  Instruments of space,

  Whose quiet communication is

  With older trees in ships on the grey waves:

  An order and a music

  Like a writing on the skies

  Too private for the reason or the pen;

  Too simple even for the heart’s surprise.

  II

  NEAR EL ALAMEIN

  This rough field of sudden war—

  This sand going down to the sea, going down,

  Was made without the approval of love,

  By a general death in the desire for living.

  Time got the range of impulse here:

  On old houses with no thought of armies,

  Burnt guns, maps and firing:

  All the apparatus of man’s behaviour

  Put by in memories for books on history:

  A growth like these bitter

  Green bulbs in the hollow sand here.

  But ideas and language do not go.

  The rate of the simple things—

  Men walking here, thinking of houses,

  Gardens, or green mountains or beliefs:

  Units of the dead in these living armies,

  Making comparison of this bitter heat,

  And the living sea, giving up its bodies,

  Level and dirty in the mist,

  Heavy with sponges and the common error.

  1946/1946

  LEVANT

  Gum, oats and syrup

  The Arabians bore.

  Evoking nothing from the sea but more

  And more employ to christen them

  With whips of salt and glittering spray,

  Their wooden homes rocked on the chastening salt.

  Lamps on altars, breath of children;

  So coming and going with their talk of bales,

  Lading and enterprises marked out

  And fell on this rusty harbour

  Where tills grew fat with cash

  And the quills of Jews invented credit,

  And in margins folded up

  Bales, gum-arabic, and syrup;

  Syrian barley in biffed coracles

  Hugging the burking gulf or blown

  As cargoes from the viny breath

  Of mariners, the English or the Dutch.

  In manners taught them nothing much

  Beyond the endurance in the vile.

  Left in history words like

  Portuguese or Greek

  Whose bastards can still speak and smile.

  After this, lamps

  Confused the foreigners;

  Boys, women and drugs

  Built this ant-hill for grammarians

  Who fed upon the fathers fat with cash,

  Turned oats and syrup here

  To ribbons and wands and rash

  Patents for sex and feathers,

  Sweets for festivals and deaths.

  Nothing changes. The indifferent

  Or the merely good died off, but fixed

  Here once the human type ‘Levant’.

  Something fine of tooth and with the soft

  Hanging lashes to the eye,

  Given once by Spain and kept

  In a mad friendship here and sadness

  By the promiscuous sea upon this spit of sand.

  Something money or promises can buy.

  1946/1946

  GREEK CHURCH: ALEXANDRIA

  The evil and the good seem undistinguished,

  Indeed all half asleep; their coming was

  No eloquent proposition of natures

  Too dense for material ends, quartered in pain.

  But a propitiation by dreams of belief

  A relief from the chafing ropes of thought.

  Piled high in Byzance like a treasure-ship

  The church heels over, sinking in sound

  And yellow lamplight while the arks and trolleys

  And blazing crockery of the orthodox God

  Make it a fearful pomp for peasants,

  A sorcery to the black-coated rational,

  To the town-girl an adventure, an adventure.

  Now however all hums and softly spins

  Like a great top, the many-headed black

  Majority merged in a single sea-shell.

  Idle thoughts press in, amazing one—

  How the theologians with beards of fire

  Divided us upon the boiling grid of thought,

  Or with dividers spun for us a fine

  Conniving cobweb—traps for the soul.

  Three sailors stand like brooms.

  The altar has opened like a honeycomb;

  An erect and flashing deacon like a despot howls.

  Surely we might ourselves exhale

  Our faults like rainbows on this incense?

  If souls did fire the old Greek barber

  Who cut my hair this morning would go flying,

  Not stand, a hopeless, window-bound and awkward

  Child at this sill of pomp,

  Moved by a hunger money could not sate,

  Smelling the miracle and softly sighing.

  1946/1946

  NOTEBOOK1

  For Eve

  Mothers and sculptors work

  By small rehearsed caresses in the block

  Each to redeeming ends,

  By shame or kisses print

  Good citizens, good lovers and good friends.

  Your impatient hero so admired

  In all his epic scenery

  Was such a vessel once, unfired,

  A chaos on the wheel and rocked

  In a muse on the womb’s dark Galilee.

  And the lovers, those two characters,

  Who have their exits and their entrances,

  A certain native style may give

  As predetermined in the bone,

  Speak through the crude gags of the grave.

  Their luck and hazard rests, my dear,

  So lightly on us in our dreams

  As voices rich with tears,

  Whom no poetic justice gave

  A friendship mad as ours.

  1946/1946

  1 Originally published as ‘For Gipsy Cohen’.

  EIGHT ASPECTS OF MELISSA

  I

  BY THE LAKE

  If seen by many minds at once your image

  As in a prism falling breaks itself,

  Or looking upwards from a gleaming spoon

  Defies: a smile squeezed up and vanishing

  In roundels of diversion like the moon.

  Yet here you are confirmed by the smallest

  Wish or kiss upon the rising darkness

  But rootless as a wick afloat in water,

  Fatherless as shoes walking over dead leaves;

  A patient whom no envy stirs but joy

  And what the harsh chords of your experience leave—

  This dark soft eye, so liquid now and hoarse

  With pleasure: or your arms in mirrors

  Combing out softly hair

  As lovely as a planet’s and remote.

  How many several small forevers

  Whispered in the rind of the ear

  Melissa, by this Mediterranean sea-edge,

  Captured and told?

  How many additions to the total silence?

  Surely we increased you by very little,

  But as with a net or gun to make your victims men?

  II

  CAIRO1

  Cut from the joints of this immense

  Darkness upon the face of Egypt lying,

  We move in the possession of our acts

  Alone, the dread apostles of our weakness.

  For look. The mauve street is swallowed

  And the bats have begun to stitch slowly.

  At the stable-door the carpenter’s thre
e sons

  Bend over a bucket of burning shavings,

  Warming their inwardness and quite unearthly

  As the candle-marking time begins.

  Three little magi under vast Capella,

  Beloved of all as shy as the astronomer,

  She troubles heaven with her golden tears,

  Tears flowing down upon us at this window,

  The children rapt, the mauve street swallowed,

  The harps of flame among the shadows

  In Egypt now and far from Nazareth.

  III

  THE ADEPTS

  Some, the great Adepts, found it

  A lesser part of them—ashes and thorns—

  Where this sea-sickness on a bed

  Proved nothing calm and virginal,

  But animal, unstable, heavy as lead.

  Some wearied for a sex

  Like a science of known relations:

  A God proved through the flesh—or else a mother.

  They dipped in this huge pond and found it

  An ocean of shipwrecked mariners instead,

  Cried out and foundered, losing one another.

  But some sailed into this haven

  Laughing, and completely undecided,

  Expecting nothing more

  Than the mad friendship of bodies,

  And farewells undisguised by pride:

  They wrote those poems—the diminutives of madness

  While at a window someone stood and cried.

  IV

  THE ENCOUNTER

  At this the last yet second meeting,

  Almost the autumn was postponed for us—

  Season when the fermenting lovers lie

  Among the gathered bunches quietly.

  So formal was it, so incurious:

  The chime of glasses, the explorer,

  The soldier and the secret agent

  With a smile inviting like a target.

  Six of a summer evening, you remember.

  The painful rehearsal of the smile

  And the words: ‘I am going into a decline,

  Promised by summer but by winter disappointed.’

  The face was turned as sadly as a hare’s,

  Provoked by prudence and discretion to repeat:

  ‘Some of them die, you know, or go away.

  Our denials are only gestures—can we help it?’

  Turn to another aspect of the thing.

  The cool muslin dress shaken with flowers—

  It was not the thought that was unworthy

  Knowing all you knew, it was the feeling.

  Idly turning from the offered tea I saw

  As swimmers see their past, in the lamplight

  Burning, particular, fastidious and lost

  Your figure forever in the same place,

  Same town and country, sorting letters

  On a green table from many foreign cities,

  The long hare’s features, the remarkable sad face.

  V

  PETRON, THE DESERT FATHER

  Waterbirds sailing upon the darkness

  Of Mareotis, this was the beginning:

  Dry reeds touched by the shallow beaks he heard

  On the sand trash of an estuary near Libya,

  This dense yellow lake, ringing now

  With the insupportable accents of the Word.

  Common among the commoners of promise

  He illustrated to the ordinary those

  Who found no meaning in the flesh’s weakness—

  The elegant psychotics on their couches

  In Alexandria, hardly tempted him,

  With talk of business, war and lovely clothes.

  The lemon-skinned, the gold, the half-aware

  Were counters for equations he examined,

  Grave as their statues fashioned from the life;

  A pioneer in pleasure on the long

  Linen-shaded colonnades he often heard

  Girls’ lips puff in the nostrils of the fife.

  Now dense as clouded urine moved the lake

  Whose waters were to be his ark and fort

  By the harsh creed of water-fowl and snake,

  To the wave-polished stone he laid his ear

  And said: ‘I dare not ask for what I hope,

  And yet I may not speak of what I fear.’

  VI

  THE RISING SUN

  Now the sun again, like a bloody convict,

  Comes up on us, the wheels of everything

  Hack and catch the luckless rising;

  The newly married, the despairing,

  The pious ant and groom,

  Open like roses in the darkened bed-room.

  The bonds are out and the debentures

  Shape the coming day’s adventures,

  The revising of money by strategy or tears—

  And here we lie like riders on a cloud

  Whom kisses only can inform

  In breath exhaling twenty thousand years

  Of curses on the sun—but not too loud.

  While the days of judgement keep,

  Lucky ladies sleek with sleep,

  Lucky ladies sleek with sleep.

  VII

  VISITATIONS

  Left like an unknown’s breath on mirrors,

  The enchanters, the persuaders

  Whom the seasons swallow up,

  Only leave us ash in saucers,

  Or to mice the last invaders

  Open cupboard-doors or else

  Lipstick-marks upon a cup.

  Fingerprint the crook of time,

  Ask him what he means by it,

  Eyes and thoughts and lovely bodies,

  David’s singing, Daphne’s wit

  Like Eve’s apple undigested

  Rot within us bit by bit.

  Experience in a humour ends,

  Wrapped in its own dark metaphor,

  And divining winter breaks:

  Now one by one the Hungers creep

  Up from the orchards of the mind

  Here to trouble and confuse

  Old men’s after-dinner sleep.

  VIII

  A PROSPECT OF CHILDREN

  All summer watch the children in the public garden,

  The tribe of children wishing you were like them—

  These gruesome little artists of the impulse

  For whom the perfect anarchy sustains

  A brilliant apprehension of the present,

  In games of joy, of love or even murder

  On this green springing grass will empty soon

  A duller opiate, Loving, to the drains.

  Cast down like asterisks among their toys,

  Divided by the lines of daylight only

  From adventure, crawl among the rocking-horses,

  And the totems, dolls and animals and rings

  To the tame suffix of a nursery sleep

  Where all but few of them

  The restless inventories of feeling keep.

  Sleep has no walls. Sleep admits

  The great Imago with its terror, yet they lie

  Like something baking, candid cheek on finger,

  With folded lip and eye

  Each at the centre of the cobweb seeking

  His boy or girl, begotten and confined

  In terror like the edges of a table

  Begot by passion and confirmed in error.

  What can they tell the watcher at the window,

  Writing letters, smoking up there alone,

  Trapped in the same limitation of his growth

  And yet not envying them their childhood

  Since he endured his own?

  1946/1946

  1 Also published as ‘The Night’.

  POSSIBLE WORLDS

  Suppose one died

  Or ended this

  This love like a long consumption,

  Unlighted by a common kiss,

  In desperation

  To cut away, cut down,

&nbs
p; This faithless hand

  Like ivy clinging to your own,

  Made solitariness not passion

  The wild soul’s iron ration …

  Stars have winked out

  A thousand year

  But the numb star of death

  The widow’s mite and portion

  Must never catch you here;

  Only cut down and heal

  Beneath the thorns of sense

  And in this darkness dense

  O feel again and find

  The limb that will not bind.

  Listen to them now,

  The inner voices pleading:

  ‘Death would not be

  Like separation is or changing,

  But a deep luxurious bleeding:

  Last of the malaises, like

  The muzzle of a dog that drops

  In the darkness to your lap:

  Softly you could take the cue.

  No one would be watching you.’

  So one recalls

  As if deep underground

  The fortune-teller’s promises;

  Your body idle now as sound,

  Green as the hanging-tree,

  And your sad mouth

  Whose leaves are printed here

  Where sky and landscape meet

  Like virgins lame of touch,

  Smiles, but says nothing much.

  And so the long long

  Parting wears us both away

  To winterfall and the return;

  Softly every night

  The great horned branch of heaven rises

  With its blossoms white;

  And time bleeds in us like a wound

  While the forest of the future

  Separating stands,

  Reaching out its hands.