Old rooks swayed in a rotten tree.

  They waved: he did not answer, although he

  Felt kindly to them all, for they could do

  What he could not: he did not dare to pray.

  His inner prohibitions were a sea

  On which he floated spellbound day by day.

  World and its fevers howled outside: within

  The Omen and the Fret that hemmed him in,

  The sense of his complete unworthiness

  Pressed each year slowly tighter like a tourniquet.

  1948/1947

  IV

  DMITRI OF CARPATHOS

  Four card-players: an ikon of the saint

  On a pitted table among eight hands

  That cough and spit or close like manacles

  On fortunate court-cards or on the bottle

  Which on the pitted paintwork stands.

  Among them one whose soft transpontine nose

  Fuller of dirty pores pricked on a chart

  Has stood akimbo on the turning world,

  From Cimbalu to Smyrna shaken hands,

  Tasted the depths of every hidden sound:

  In wine or poppy a drunkard with a drunkard’s heart

  Who never yet was known to pay his round.

  Meanwhile below in harbour his rotten boat,

  Beard green from winter quarters turns

  Her scraggy throat to nudge the northern star,

  And like a gipsy burns and burns; goes wild

  Till something climbs the hill

  And stands beside him at the tavern table

  To pluck his drunken elbow like a child.

  1948/1947

  V

  PANAGIOTIS OF LINDOS

  Dark birds in nature redevise

  Their linings every year: are not

  The less like these weaving fishermen

  Bent so exactly at their tattered seines

  On a rotten wharf, their molten catch

  Now sold and loaded: though they feather only

  For fathoms of sea and the fishes within it,

  Needles passing in a surf of lights.

  Panagiotis has resigned it all

  For an enamel can and olive shade:

  His concern a tavern prospect,

  Miles of sweet chestnut and borage.

  This armament of wine he shares now

  With the greatest philosopher, the least

  Inventor, the meanest doctrine of rest,

  Mixing leisure and repose like wine and water,

  Tutor and pupil in the crater.

  His dark sleep is bruised by each

  Sink of the sun below the castle

  Where the Sporades have opened

  Their spokes, and the whole Aegean

  In brilliant soda turns the darkening bays.

  1948/1948

  VI

  A RHODIAN CAPTAIN

  Ten speechless knuckles lie along a knee

  Among their veins, gone crooked over voyages,

  Made by this ancient captain. Life has now

  Contracted like the pupil of an eye

  To a slit in space and time for images—

  All he has seen of sage and arbutus:

  Touched berries where the golden eagle crashes

  From its chariot of air and dumb trap:

  Islands fortunate as Atlantis was …

  Yet while we thought him voyaging through life

  He was really here, in truth, outside the doorpost,

  In the shade of the eternal vine, his wife,

  With the same tin plate of olives on his lap.

  1948/1947

  ELEGY ON THE CLOSING OF THE FRENCH BROTHELS

  For Henry Miller and George Katsimbalis

  I

  Last of the great autumnal capitals

  Disengaging daily like a sword

  The civil codes, behaviour, friendship, love,

  In houses of shining glass,

  On tablecloths stained with pools of light,

  By the rambling river’s evening scents

  Carried our freight of pain so lightly:

  And towards evening when the inkwells overturn

  And at last the figure which has sat

  Motionless for hours, pours himself out

  One glass of moonlight, drinks it, and retires.

  By the railway arches a stone plinth.

  Under the shadows of the lamps the figures.

  So many ways of dividing up the self:

  Correspondences moving outwards along a line

  Of nerves, the memory of letters

  Smelling like apples in an empty cupboard,

  And at midnight the pall of clocks,

  At odds among themselves, the shuffling

  Of innumerable packs of cards where each shall see

  One day his face instead of fortune’s be.

  II

  Bound here to the great axis of the sex,

  Black source that feeds your manners, gives

  Information and vivacity to food and linen,

  Determined as the penetration into self-abuse—

  For each separation by kisses forges new bonds:

  Three or four words on the back of a letter,

  Tessa waiting on a corner with all she feels,

  Rain glittering in that peacock’s eye,

  As heavy with sense as a king’s letter with seals.

  Here the professional observer met you,

  The amateur in melancholy,

  To the swish of an invisible fountain,

  Drinking from a glass under a man on horseback,

  Talking to a lady with a poisoned finger.

  Women turned over by the mind and each

  A proper noun, an act of trespass,

  Improper for its aberration but accepted

  As in a mirror one is twice but accepts.

  So in these magazines of love they moved,

  Experience misbegotten in each face like rings

  In wood, were commentators on our weakness,

  Through cycles of repentance in the blood,

  Exhausted the body’s ugly contents in a sigh,

  Left, hard as ash, the object’s shape: an art

  Eros began, self-murder carries on.

  III

  Of all the sicknesses, autumnal Paris,

  This self-infection was the best, where friends

  Like self-possession could be learned

  Through the mystery of a slit

  Like a tear in an old fur coat,

  A hole in a paper lantern where the seeing I

  Looked out and measured one:

  The ferocious knuckle of a sex

  Standing to acknowledge like a hambone

  Our membership in the body of a tribe

  Holy and ridiculous at once:

  Symbol of unrecognised desire, pain, pain.

  You might have seen silence flower in eyes,

  The tobacco eyes of every human critic,

  Or a mouth laid along the meniscus

  Of a lighted glass blazing like a diamond.

  All the great brothels closed save Sacré Coeur!

  Windows boarded up from the inheritors,

  The nameless donors inhabiting marble fanes

  On peninsulas with cocks of gold in sunlight,

  Under the oleanders, printed in warm moss,

  The bare ankles playing on a flute,

  Selecting the bodies of boys, the temporary

  Refuge for a kiss on the silver backs of mirrors:

  Powder of statues in a grove born old,

  Born sightless, wingless, never to be loved.

  IV

  Crude man in his coat of nerves and hair

  Whose kisses like apostles go about

  On translated business never quite his own,

  Derives from the obscure medium of the body,

  As through some glass coffin, a retrievéd sprite,

  Himself holding the holy bottle, fast asl
eep.

  All these rotten galleries were symbols

  Of us, where the girls like squirrels

  Leaned in the tarnished mirrors sadly sighing:

  The wind in empty clothing, while the destroyer

  Sorted the bottles for just the right medicine.

  Below us, far below on the stairway somewhere

  Tessa had already combed the dark disorder

  Of curls, the flash of pectorals in a mirror,

  Invented already this darker niece of Egypt,

  Who leaves the small hashish-pipe by the pillow,

  Uneasy in red slippers like the dust in urns,

  The smashed columns, wells full of leaves,

  The faces white as burns.

  V

  We suffer according to the terms we make

  With time in cities: allowing to be rooted from us

  Like useless teeth the few great healers

  Who understand the penalties of confession,

  And cannot fear these half-invented Gods,

  Inhabiting our own cities of unconquered pain.

  Now the capitals settle slowly in the sea

  Of their failures. All the common brute has done

  Building like a rat the rotten shanties

  Of his self-esteem beside the water’s edge,

  His fear and prejudice into a dead index.

  It is not enough. We have still to outgrow

  The prohibitions in us with the fears they grow from:

  For the beloved will be no happier

  Nor the unloved less hungry when the miracle begins:

  Yet both will be ineffably disclosed

  In their own natures by simplicity

  Like roses in a giving off of grace.

  1948/1947

  Puisqu’il lui est interdit d’éluder la contradiction aussi bien par le divertissement que par le suicide ou par le ‘saut’ mystique, quelle forme de vie adoptera L’Homme Absurde pour rester fidèle à sa vocation de lucidité?

  Il s’attache à dégager non seulement l’opacité d’un corps de pierre ou d’une ‘chose de beauté’, mais aussi l’objectivité angoissante du Moi à l’égard du Je.

  C’est ainsi que le Séducteur, le Comédien, le Conquérant et L’Artiste présentent ces traits communs de vivre dans L’Immédiat, de tendre à un renouvellement indéfini de leurs expériences, de sauvegarder à chaque moment leur lucidité dérisoire et leur libre disponibilité, d’accepter, enfin, le risque d’être damnés ou condamnés pour n’avoir prétendu recevoir leur bonheur que de leurs propres mains.

  Le Sens de L’Absurde

  GEORGES BLIN

  POMONA DE MAILLOL

  For Eve

  An old man tamed his garden with wet clay

  Until Pomona rose, a bubble in his arms.

  The time and place grow ripe when the idea

  Marries its proper image in volition,

  When desire and intention kiss and bruise.

  A cord passed round the body of the mermaid

  Drew her sleeping from the underworld,

  As when the breath of resin like a code

  Rises from some unguarded still, Pomona

  Breathing, surely a little out of breath

  The image disengaging from the block,

  A little out of breath, and wondering

  If art is self-reflection, who he was

  She woke within the side of, what old man

  In his smock and dirty cap of cloth,

  Drinking through trembling fingers now

  A ten year siege of her, the joy in touching

  The moistened flanks of her idea with all

  An old man’s impatience of the carnal wish?

  1948/1948

  ANNIVERSARY

  For T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, science of intimacies,

  In you his early roots drove through

  The barbarian compost of our English

  To sound new veins and marbled all his verses

  Through and through like old black ledgers,

  Hedging in pain by form, and giving

  Quotations from the daily treaty poets make

  With men, possessions or a private demon:

  Became at last this famous solitary

  Sitting at one bleak uncurtained window

  Over wintry London patiently repeating

  That art is determined by its ends

  In conscience and in morals. This was startling.

  Yet marriages might be arranged between

  Old fashions and contemporary disorders.

  Sole student of balance in a falling world

  He helped us mend the little greenstick fractures

  Of our verse, taught polish in austerity.

  Others who know him will add private humours,

  And photographs to albums; taken near Paris,

  Say, drinking among some foreign dons all night

  From leather bubbles in a tavern: a remark

  That silenced a fussy duke: yet these

  Alluding and delimiting can only mystify

  The singer and his mystery more, they do not chain.

  Neither may we ever explain but pointing

  To a new star one needs new vision for

  Like some late hornbeam risen over England,

  Relate it to a single sitting man,

  In a high window there, beside a lamp,

  Some crumpled paper, a disordered bed.

  1980/1948

  THE CRITICS

  They never credit us

  With being bad enough

  The boys that come to edit us:

  Of simply not caring when a prize,

  Something for nothing, comes our way,

  A wife, a mistress, or a holiday

  From People living neckfast in their lies.

  No: Shakespear’s household bills

  Could never be responsible, they say,

  For all the heartbreak and the 1,000 ills

  His work is heir to, poem, sonnet, play …

  Emended readings give the real reason:

  The times were out of joint, the loves, the season.

  Man With A Message—how could you forget

  To read your proofs, the heartache and the fret?

  The copier or the printer

  Must take the blame for it in all

  The variants they will publish by the winter.

  ‘By elision we quarter suffering.’ Too true.

  ‘From images and scansion can be learned.’ …

  Yet under it perhaps may be discerned

  A something else afoot—a Thing

  Lacking both precedent and name and gender:

  An uncreated Weight which left its clue,

  Making him run up bills,

  Making him violent or distrait or tender:

  Leaving for Stratford might have heard It say:

  ‘Tell them I won’t be back on Saturday.

  My wife will understand I’m on a bender.’

  And to himself muttering, muttering: ‘Words

  Added to words multiply the space

  Between this feeling and my expressing It.

  The wires get far too hot. Time smoulders

  Like a burning rug. I will be free.’ …

  And all the time from the donkey’s head

  The lover is whispering: ‘This is not

  What I imagined as Reality.

  If truth were needles surely eyes would see?’

  1948/1948

  PHILEREMO

  A philosopher in search of human values

  Might have seen something in the coarse

  Black boots the guide wore when he led us:

  Boots with cracked eyes and introspective

  Laces, rich in historical error as this

  Old wall we picked the moss from, reading

  Into it invasions by the Dorians or Medes.

  But the bearded arboreal historian

  Saw nothing of it all, was nothing the
n.

  His education had derailed the man

  Until he moved, a literary reminiscence,

  Through quotations only, fine as hair.

  The stones spoke to him. Reflected there

  In a cistern I heard you thinking: Europe

  Also, the whole of our egopetal culture

  Is done for and must vanish soon.

  And still we have not undergone the poet’s truth.

  Could he comfort us in more than this

  Blue sea and air cohering blandly

  Across that haze of flats,

  The smoking middens of our history—

  Aware perhaps only of the two children

  Asleep in the car beside a bear in cotton gloves?

  1948/1948

  SONG FOR ZARATHUSTRA

  Le saltimbanque is coming with

  His heels behind his head.

  His smile is mortuary and

  His whole expression dead.

  The acrobat, the acrobat,

  Demanding since the Fall

  Little enough but hempen stuff

  To climb and hang us all.

  Mysterious inventions like

  The trousers and the hat

  Bewitched our real intentions:

  We sewed the fig-leaves flat.

  Man sewed his seven pockets

  Upon his hairy clothes

  But woman in her own white flesh

  Has one she seldom shows.

  An aperture on anguish,

  A keyhole on disgrace:

  The features stay grimacing

  Upon the mossy face.

  A cup without a handle

  A staff without a crook,

  The sawdust in the golly’s head,