1960/1955

  BALLAD OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

  Extracts from a Case-Book

  MONDAY

  She dreams she is chased by a black buck-nigger

  But a fall in the coal-face blocks out the dream,

  Something as long and lank as a lanyard,

  Slow as a glacier, cold as cold cream—

  Something inside her starts to scream …

  TUESDAY

  Dreams she is chased by a man in a nightshirt,

  Lawrence of Arabia dressed in a sheet:

  Then locked by the crew of a Liberty Ship

  With rows and rows and rows of refrigerated meat

  While the voices keep repeating ‘Eat’.

  WEDNESDAY

  Dreams she is handcuffed to a dancing-partner

  And dragged round a roller-skating rink.

  She swallows the ring on her wedding-finger

  Falls through the ice but doesn’t seem to sink

  Though her party clothes begin to shrink.

  THURSDAY

  Dreams she is queen of a mountain of cork,

  Too hot to sit on, too cold to wear,

  Naked, she pricks with a toasting-fork

  A statue of Venus reclining there

  With a notice saying: No charge for wear and tear.

  FRIDAY

  She dreams she’s a dog-team tugging poor Scott,

  Sheer to the confines of the Pole:

  Suddenly the Arctic becomes a-burning hot,

  And when they arrive it’s just an empty hole,

  A geyser whistling in a mountain of coal.

  SATURDAY

  Dreams she’s the queen of a city-culture

  Lovely as Helen but doomed to spoil:

  Under her thighs roll the capital rivers,

  The Rhine and the Volga flowing like oil.

  Hamlet offers her a buttoned foil.

  SUNDAY

  What has she got that we haven’t got?

  Isn’t she happy and lovely too?

  She dreams that her husband a bank-director

  Locked in the Monkey-House at the Zoo—

  Here’s the clinical picture but what can we do?

  1956/1955

  AT THE LONG BAR

  Bowed like a foetus at the long bar sit,

  You common artist whose uncommon ends

  Deflower the secret contours of a mind

  And all around you pitying find

  Like severed veins your earthly friends …

  (The sickness of the oyster is the pearl)

  Dead bottles all around infect

  Stale air the exploding corks bewitch—

  O member of this outlawed sect,

  Only the intolerable itch,

  Skirt-fever, keeps the anthropoid erect.

  Husband or wife or child condemn

  This chain-gang which we all inherit:

  Or those bleak ladders to despair

  Miscalled high place and merit.

  Dear, if these knotted words could wake

  The dead boy and the buried girl …

  (The sickness of the oyster is the pearl)

  1956/1955

  STYLE

  Something like the sea,

  Unlaboured momentum of water

  But going somewhere,

  Building and subsiding,

  The busy one, the loveless.

  Or the wind that slits

  Forests from end to end,

  Inspiriting vast audiences,

  Ovations of leafy hands

  Accepting, accepting.

  But neither is yet

  Fine enough for the line I hunt.

  The dry bony blade of the

  Sword-grass might suit me

  Better: an assassin of polish.

  Such a bite of perfect temper

  As unwary fingers provoke,

  Not to be felt till later,

  Turning away, to notice the thread

  Of blood from its unfelt stroke.

  1955/1955

  THASOS

  To My Godson

  Rupert Burrows

  Indifferent history! In such a place

  Can we choose what really matters most?

  Three hundred oars munched up the gulf.

  A tyrant fell. The wise men turned their beds

  To face the East—this was war. Or else

  Eating and excreting raised to the rank of arts:

  Sporting the broad purple—this was peace,

  For demagogues exhausted by sensations.

  From covens of delight they brought

  The silver lampreys served on deathless chargers

  By cooks of polity and matchless tact.

  Only their poets differed in being free

  From the historic consciousness and its

  Defeats: wise servants of the magnet and

  The sieve, against this human backdrop told

  The truth in oracles and never asked themselves

  In what or why they never could believe.

  1955/1955

  A PORTRAIT OF THEODORA

  I recall her by a freckle of gold

  In the pupil of one eye, an odd

  Strawberry-gold: and after many years

  Of forgetting that musical body—

  Arms too long, wrists too slender—

  Remember only the unstable wishes

  Disquieting the flesh. I will not

  Deny her pomp was laughable, urban:

  Behind it one could hear the sad

  Provincial laughter rotted by insomnia.

  None of these meetings are planned,

  I guess, or willed by the exemplars

  Of a city’s love—a city founded in

  The name of love: to me is always

  Brown face, white teeth, cheap summer frock

  In green and white stripes and then

  Forever a strawberry eye. I recalled no more

  For years. The eye was lying in wait.

  Then in another city from the same

  Twice-used air and sheets, in the midst

  Of a parting: the same dark bedroom,

  Arctic chamber-pot and cruel iron bed,

  I saw the street-lamp unpick Theodora

  Like an old sweater, unwrinkle eyes and mouth,

  Unbandaging her youth to let me see

  The wounds I had not understood before.

  How could I have ignored such wounds?

  The bloody sweepings of a loving smile

  Strewed like Osiris among the dunes?

  Now only my experience recognizes her

  Too late, among the other great survivors

  Of the city’s rage, and places her among

  The champions of love—among the true elect!

  1955/1955

  ASPHODELS: CHALCIDICE

  ‘No one will ever pick them, I think,

  The ugly off-white clusters: all the grace

  Lies in the name of death named.

  Are they a true certificate for death?’

  ‘I wonder’

  ‘You might say that once the sages,

  Death being identified, forgave it language:

  Called it “asphodel”, as who should say

  The synonym for scentless, colourless,

  Solitary,

  Rock-loving …’ ‘Memory is all of these.’

  ‘Yes, they asserted the discipline of memory,

  Which admits of no relapse in its

  Consignment, does not keep forever.’

  ‘Nor does death.’

  ‘You mean our dying?’ ‘No, but when one is

  Alone, neither happy nor unhappy, in

  The deepest ache of reason where this love

  Becomes a malefactor, clinging so,

  You surely know—’

  ‘Death’s stock will stand no panic,

  Be beautiful in jars or on a coffin,

  Exonerate the flesh when it has turned

  Or mock the
enigma with an epitaph

  It never earned.’

  ‘These quite precisely guard ironic truth,

  And you may work your way through every

  Modulation of the rose, to fill your jars

  With pretty writing-stuff: but for death—’

  ‘Truly, always give us

  These comfortless, convincing, even, yes,

  A little mocking, Grecian asphodels.’

  1955/1955

  FREEDOM

  O Freedom which to every man entire

  Presents imagined longings to his fire,

  To swans the water, bees the honey-cell,

  To bats the dark, to lovers loving well,

  Only to the wise may you

  Restricting and confining be,

  All who half-delivered from themselves

  Suffer your conspiracy,

  Freedom, Freedom, prison of the free.

  1956/1956

  NEAR PAPHOS

  Her sea limps up here twice a day

  And sigh by leaden sigh deposes

  Crude granite hefts and sponges

  Sucked smooth as foreheads or as noses;

  No footprints dove the labouring sand,

  For terrene clays bake smooth

  But coarse as a gipsy’s hand.

  A rose in an abandoned well,

  The sexless babble of a spring,

  A carob’s torn and rosy flesh,

  A vulture sprawling on a cliff

  Will tell the traveller nothing.

  The double axe, the double sex,

  The noble mystery of the doves,

  Before men sorted out their loves

  By race and gender chose

  One from these dying groves.

  This much the sea limps in to touch

  With old confining foam-born hand

  While lovers seeking nothing much

  Or hunting the many through the one

  May taste in its reproachful roar

  The ancient relish of her sun.

  1966/1956

  THE OCTAGON ROOM

  (1955)

  Veronese grey! Here in the Octagon Room

  Our light ruffles and decodes

  Greys of cigar-ash or river clay

  Into the textual plumage of a mind—

  Paulo, all his Muses held

  Quietly in emulsion up against

  A pane of cockney sky.

  It is not only the authority

  Of godly sensual forms which pity

  And overwhelm us—this grey copied

  From eyes I no more see,

  Recording every shade of pain, yes,

  All it takes to give smiles

  The deathly candour of a dying art,

  Or worth to words exchanged in darkness:

  Is it only the dead who have such eyes?

  No, really,

  I think it is the feudal calm

  Of sensuality enjoyed without aversion

  Or regret … (incident of the ring

  Lost in the grass: her laughter).

  I should have been happy

  In these rainy streets, a captive still

  Like all these glittering hostages

  We carried out of Italy, canvases

  Riding the cracking winds in great London

  Parks: happy or unhappy, who can tell you?

  Only Veronese grey walks backwards

  In the past across my mind

  To where tugs still howl and mumble

  On the father river,

  And the grey feet passing, quiver

  On pavements greyer than his greys …

  Less wounding perhaps because the belongers

  Loved here, died here, and took their art

  Like love, with a pinch of salt, yes

  Their pain clutched in the speechless

  Deathless calm of Method. Gods!

  1960/1956

  EVA BRAUN’S DREAM

  First come the Infantry in scented bodices,

  Deployed, and after them the Birdwomen,

  (The Ladies Air Arm) clad in shirts of male,

  And riding gravid chargers shod with spurs.

  In shrill capitulation like some endless wife.

  After them in rumbling families

  Symbolic engines only found in Jung,

  Bombs polished on the lathe like eggs,

  Grey mammary tanks, forceps and hooks with eyes,

  Unbuttoned panzers, huge uncircumcised artillery,

  Grave in procession rustle past the stand.

  ‘One age, one land, one leader and one sex.’

  1980/1957

  THE COTTAGER

  Here is a man who says: Let there be light.

  Let who is dressed in hair walk upright,

  The house give black smoke, the children

  Be silenced by fire and apples. Let

  A sedative evening bring steaming cattle

  The domestic kettle, contagion of sleep,

  Deeper purer surer even than Eden.

  Twin tides speak making of two three

  By fission by fusion, a logarithmic sea.

  What was bitter in the apple is eaten deep,

  Rust sleeps in the steel, canker will keep.

  Let one plus one quicken and be two,

  Keep silence that silence keep you.

  1960/1960

  NIGHT EXPRESS

  Night falls. The dark expresses

  Roll back their iron scissors to commence

  Precision of the wheels’ elision

  From whose dark serial jabber sparks

  Swing swaying through the mournful capitals

  And in these lighted cages sleep

  With open eyes the passengers

  Each committed to his private folly,

  On hinges of wanhope the long

  Sleeping shelves of men and women,

  A library of maggots dreaming, rolls.

  Some retiring to their sleeping past,

  On clicking pillows feel the flickering peep

  Of lighted memories, keys slipped in grooves

  Parted like lips receiving or resisting kisses.

  Pillars of smoke expend futurity.

  This is how it is for me, for you

  It must be different lying awake to hear

  At a garden’s end the terrible club-foot

  Crashing among iron spars, the female shrieks,

  Love-song of steel and the consenting night.

  To feel the mocking janitor, sleep,

  Shake now and wake to lean there

  On a soft elbow seeing where we race

  A whiplash curving outwards to the stars,

  A glowing coal to light the lamps of space.

  1960/1960

  MYTHOLOGY

  Miss Willow, secretly known as ‘tit’ …

  Plotkin who slipped on new ice

  And wounded the stinks master

  The winter when the ponds froze over …

  Square roots of the symbol Abraham

  Cut off below the burning bush,

  Or in the botany classes heads

  Drying between covers like rare ferns,

  Stamen and pistil, we were young then.

  Later with tunes like ‘Hips and Whores’

  The song-book summed us up,

  Mixing reality with circumstance,

  With Hotchkiss cock of the walk

  Top button undone, and braided cap,

  He was the way and the life.

  What dismays is not time

  Assuaging every thirst with a surprise,

  Bitterness hidden in desiring bodies,

  Unfolded strictly, governed by the germ.

  Plotkin cooked like a pie in iron lungs:

  Glass rods the doctors dipped in burning nitrates

  Dripped scalding on in private hospitals

  And poor ‘tit’ Willow who had been

  Young, pretty and perhaps contemptuous

  Dreaming of love, was
carried to Spain in a cage.

  1960/1960

  CAVAFY

  I like to see so much the old man’s loves,

  Egregious if you like and often shabby

  Protruding from the ass’s skin of verse,

  For better or for worse,

  The bones of poems cultured by a thirst—

  Dilapidated taverns, dark eyes washed

  Now in the wry and loving brilliance

  Of such barbaric memories

  As held them when the dyes of passion ran.

  No cant about the sottishness of man!

  The forest of dark eyes he mused upon,

  Out of ikons, waking beside his own

  In stuffy brothels, on stained mattresses,

  Watched by the melting vision of the flesh;

  Eros the tutor of our callowness

  Deployed like ants across his ageing flesh

  The crises of great art, the riders

  Of love, their bloody lariats whistling,

  The cries locked in the quickened breath,

  The love-feast of a sort of love-in-death.

  And here I find him great. Never

  To attempt a masterpiece of size—

  You must leave life for that. No

  But always to preserve the adventive

  Minute, never to destroy the truth,

  Admit the coarse manipulations of the lie.

  If only the brown fingers franking his love