Of washerwomen screeching on the Liffey,
Soaping the flaccid thighs and dugs,
Remagnetized again by thoughts of old
Familiar, incoherent, measureless
Contempts the grabbing flesh must
Always hold, like thefts from human logic,
And savour till the gums and spices fade.
3 January 1953
Dear, behind the choking estuaries
Of sleep or waking, in the acts
Which dream themselves and make,
Swollen under luminol, responsibilities
Which no one else can take,
I watch the faultless measure of your dying
Into an unknown misused animal
Held by the ropes and drugs; the puny
Recipe society proposes when machines
Break down. Love was our machine.
And through each false connection I
So clearly pierce to reach the God
Infecting this machine, not ours but by
Compulsion of the city and the times;
A God forgetting slowly how to feel:
A broken sex which, lying to itself,
Could never hope to heal.
It was so simple to observe the liars,
The one impaled, and lying like a log,
The other at some fountain-nipple drinking
His art from the whole world, helplessly
Disbanding reason like a thirsty dog.
6 January 1953
Madness confides its own theology,
An ape-world bleak in its custom:
Not arbitrary, for even the delusive
Lies concert inside their dissonance:
And are apes less human than
Humans are to each other? Answer.
In clinic beds we reach to where
All cultures intersect, inverted now
By the hungry heart and jumbled out
In friends or sculpture or kissing-stuff,
Measured against the chattering
Of gross primary desires, a code of needs
Where Marxist poems are born and die perhaps.
The white screens they have set up
Like the mind’s censor under Babel
Are trying to keep from the white coats
All possible foreknowledge of the enigma.
But the infected face of loneliness
Smiles back wherever mirrors droop and bleed.
9 January 1953
Imagine we are the living who inhabit
Freezing offices in a winter town,
Who daily founder deeper in
Our self-disdain being mirrored in
Each others’ complicated ways of dying.
Here neither brick nor glass can warm
The sanitary dust of central heating,
And the damp air like a poultice wets
The fears of living which thought begets.
Here we feed, as prisoners feed, spiders
Important to the reason as Bruce’s was;
Huge sprawling emotions kept in bottles
Below the civil surface of the mind,
That snap and sway upon the webs
Of tearless resignation bought with sleep.
Some few have what I have:
Silent gold pressure of eyes
Belonging to one deeply hurt, deeply aware.
Truly though we never speak
The past has marked us each
In different lives contending for each other:
We bear like ancient marble well-heads
Marks of the ropes they lowered in us,
Telling of the concerns of time,
The knife of feeling in the art of love.
12 January 1953
So at last we come to the writer’s
Middle years, the hardest yet to bear,
All will agree: for it is now
He condenses, prunes and tries to order
The experiences which gorged upon his youth.
Every wrinkle now earned is gifted,
Every grey hair tolls. He matches now
Old kisses to new, and in the bodies
Of younger learners throws off his sperm
Like lumber just to ease the weight
Of sighing for their youth, his abandoned own;
And in the coital slumber poaches
From lips and tongues the pollen
Of youth, to dust the licence of his art.
You cannot guess how he has been waiting
For these years, these ripe and terrible
Years of the agon; with the athlete’s
Calm foreknowledge of a deathly ripeness,
Facing perhaps a public death by blows,
Or a massive sprain in the centre of his mind,
The whole world; his champion fever glows
With all the dark misgivings of the bout.
But now even fear cannot despoil the body
And will, trained for the even contest,
Fed by the promise of his country’s laurels.
So, having dispossessed himself, and being
Now for the first time prepared to die
He feels at last trained for the second life.
1955/1954
ON MIRRORS
You gone, the mirrors all reverted,
Lay banging in the empty house,
Redoubled their efforts to impede
Waterlogged images of faces pleading.
So Fortunatus had a mirror which
Imperilled his reason when it broke;
The sleepers in their dormitory of glass
Stirred once and sighed but never woke.
Time amputated so will bleed no more
But flow like refuse now in clocks
On clinic walls, in libraries and barracks,
Not made to spend but kill and nothing more.
Yet mirrors abandoned drink like ponds:
(Once they resumed the childhood of love)
And overflowing, spreading, swallowing
Like water light, show one averted face,
As in the capsule of the human eye
Seen at infinity, the outer end of time,
A man and woman lying sun-bemused
In a blue vineyard by the Latin sea,
Steeped in each other’s minds and breathing there
Like wicks inhaling deep in golden oil.
1955/1954
The notion of emptiness engenders compassion.
MILA REPA
ORPHEUS
Orpheus, beloved famulus,
Know to us in a dark congeries
Of intimations from the dead:
Encamping among our verses—
Harp-beats of a sea-bird’s wings—
Do you contend in us, though now
A memory only, the smashed lyre
Washed up entangled in your hair,
But sounding still as here,
O monarch of all initiates and
The dancer’s only perfect peer?
In the fecund silences of the
Painter, or the poet’s wrestling
With choice you steer like
A great albatross, spread white
On the earth-margins the sailing
Snow-wings in the world’s afterlight:
Mentor of all these paper ships
Cockled from fancy on a tide
Made navigable only by your skill
Which in some few approves
A paper recreation of lost loves.
1955/1955
MNEIAE
Soft as puffs of smoke combining,
Mneiae—remembrance of past lives:
The shallow pigmentation of eternity
Upon the pouch of time and place existing.
I, the watcher, smoking at a table,
And I, my selves, observed by human choice,
A disinherited portion of the whole:
With you the sibling of my self-desire
,
The carnal and the temporal voice,
The singing bird upon the spire:
And love, the grammar of that war
Which time’s the only ointment for,
Which time’s the only ointment for.
1955/1955
NIKI
Love on a leave-of-absence came,
Unmoored the silence like a barge,
Set free to float on lagging webs
The swan-black wise unhindered night.
(Bitter and pathless were the ways
Of sleep to which such beauty led.)
1955/1955
THE DYING FALL
The islands rebuffed by water.
Estuaries of putty and gold.
A smokeless arc of Latin sky.
One star, less than a week old.
Memory now, I lead her haltered.
Stab of the opiate in the arm
When the sea wears bronze scales and
Hushes in the ambush of a calm.
The old dialogue always rebegins
Between us: but now the spring
Ripens, neither will be attending,
For rosy as feet of pigeons pressed
In clay, the kisses we possessed,
Or thought we did: so borrowing, lending,
Stacked fortunes in our love’s society—
Each in the perfect circle of a sigh was ending.
1955/1955
POEM
Find time hanging, cut it down
All the universe you own.
Masterless and still untamed
Poet, lead the race you’ve shamed.
Lover, cut the rational knot
That made your thinking rule-of-thumb
And barefoot on the plum-dark hills
Go Wander in Elysium.
1960/1955
AT STRATI’S
Remember please, time has no joints,
Pours over the great sills of thought,
Not clogging nor resisting but
Yawning to inherit the year’s quarters;
Weaving you up the unbroken series
Of corn, ammonites and men
In a single unlaboured continuum,
And not in slices called by day and night,
And not in objects called by place and thing.
You say I do not write, but the taverns
Have no clocks, and I conscripted
By loneliness observe how other drinkers
Sit at Strati’s embalmed in reverie:
Forms raise green cones of wine,
And loaded heads recline on loaded arms,
Under a sky pronounced by cypresses,
Packed up, all of us, like loaves
Human and plant, memory and wish.
The very calendar props an empty inkwell.
1955/1955
THE TREE OF IDLENESS
I shall die one day I suppose
In this old Turkish house I inhabit:
A ragged banana-leaf outside and here
On the sill in a jam-jar a rock-rose.
Perhaps a single pining mandolin
Throbs where cicadas have quarried
To the heart of all misgiving and there
Scratches on silence like a pet locked in.
Will I be more or less dead
Than the village in memory’s dispersing
Springs, or in some cloud of witness see,
Looking back, the selfsame road ahead?
By the moist clay of a woman’s wanting,
After the heart has stopped its fearful
Gnawing, will I descry between
This life and that another sort of haunting?
Author’s Note
The title of this poem is taken from the name of the tree which stands outside Bellapaix Abbey in Cyprus, and which confers the gift of pure idleness on all who sit under it.
No: the card-players in tabs of shade
Will play on: the aerial springs
Hiss: in bed lying quiet under kisses
Without signature, with all my debts unpaid
I shall recall nights of squinting rain,
Like pig-iron on the hills: bruised
Landscapes of drumming cloud and everywhere
The lack of someone spreading like a stain.
Or where brown fingers in the darkness move,
Before the early shepherds have awoken,
Tap out on sleeping lips with these same
Worn typewriter keys a poem imploring
Silence of lips and minds which have not spoken.
1955/1955
BITTER LEMONS
In an island of bitter lemons
Where the moon’s cool fevers burn
From the dark globes of the fruit,
And the dry grass underfoot
Tortures memory and revises
Habits half a lifetime dead
Better leave the rest unsaid,
Beauty, darkness, vehemence
Let the old sea-nurses keep
Their memorials of sleep
And the Greek sea’s curly head
Keep its calms like tears unshed
Keep its calms like tears unshed.
1960/1955
NEAR KYRENIA
The old Levant which made us once
So massive a nurse and a protector
Is quiet now under the moon. In waterglass
Four noons have swallowed her,
Black as a coalface to the Turkish coast.
Your village sleeps your
Little house is tucked away and locked.
I do not know any longer what to make
Of my feelings; for example, how our bodies
Entangled in water softly floated out
Beyond the limits of freewill, wet fingers
Touching…. No longer to be intimidated
By this empty beach, frail horned stars,
A victim of memory who could not say
How deft, how weightless are the kisses now
Which wake this unknown, the night sea,
Unlimbered here among its silver bars.
1980/1955
EPISODE1
I should set about memorising this little room,
The errors of taste which make it every other,
Like and unlike, this ugly rented bed
Now transfigured as a woman is transfigured
By love, disfigured, related and yet unrelated
To science, to the motiveless appeals of happiness.
I should set about memorising this room
It will be a long time empty and airless;
Thoughts will hang about it like mangy cats,
The mirror, vacant and idiotic as an actress
Reflect darkness, cavity of an old tooth,
A house shut up, a garden left untended.
This is probably the very moment to store it all,
Earlobes tasting of salt, a dying language
Of perfume, and the heart of someone
Hanging open on its hinges like a gate;
Rice-powder on a sleeve and two dead pillows
The telephone shook and shook but could not wake.
1956/1955
1 Originally published as ‘Nicosia’.
THE MEETING
I have brought my life to this point,
Down long staircases of wanhope
To this dead house, the heart, by
Dusty parallels, by pastures of desire,
By folly out of loneliness begotten, and
Nothing I learned has been forgotten.
Yet all this time you have been climbing
The same black beanstalks of the mind,
Through meadows of unshed tears,
Quite near me though unseen,
Depicted only by a shaking branch,
A voice weeping in a cloud
Or a commotion among the birds
In every silence there has been.
I have brought my l
ife to this point
Where the paths in darkness cross.
Now wait for the one annealing word,
Belonging as spring rain to grass—
But how if she should pass and lose
The soft collision of these mortal worlds
Called by our names? Was it for this
The climbers set out for the heart of time
Never to know the unknown face
Or like a ghost of music to exchange
Only the bitter keepsake of a smile?
1980/1955
JOHN DONNE
From the dark viands of the church
His food in tortured verse he bore
Impersonating with each kiss
All that he feared of love and more,
For each must earn his thorny crown
And each his poisoned kiss,
Whoever quarries pain will find
By that remove or this
The sacrament the lovers took
In wine-dark verse suborned his book,
In every sensual measure heard
The chuckles of the daemon Word.
He saw the dark blood in the cup
Which one day drank his being up.