He emerges, He is there. Who? I do not know.

  Deutre presumably in the guise of Rilke’s angel

  Or Balzac’s double mirrored androgyne.

  Deutre makes up his lips at dusk,

  His sputum is tinged with venous blood.

  Nevertheless a purity of intent is established

  Simple as on its axis spins an earth.

  It was his pleasure to recite

  With an emphasis worthy of the Vedas

  Passages from the Analysis Situs: as

  la géometrie à n dimensions

  a un objet réel, personne n’en

  doute aujourd’hui. Les Etres

  de l’hyperespace sont susceptibles

  de définitions précises comme ceux

  de l’espace ordinaire, et si nous

  ne pouvons les répresenter nous

  pouvons les concevoir et les étudier.

  The third eye belongs to spatial consciousness

  He seems to say; there is a way of growing.

  It was he who persuaded me at Christmas to go away.

  Far southwards to submit myself to other towns

  To landscapes more infernal and less purifying.

  He persuaded Solange to lend me the money and she

  Was glad to repay what the acrobat had spent,

  But she saw no point in it, ‘Who can live outside

  Paris, among barbarians, and to what end?

  Besides all these places are full of bugs

  And you can see them on the cinema without moving

  For just a few francs, within reach of a café.

  But if go you must I will see you off.’

  Remoter than Aldebaran, Deutre smiled.

  Only many years later was I able

  To repay him with such words as:

  ‘Throughout the living world as we know it

  The genetic code is based on four letters,

  The Pythagorean Quaternary, as you might say.’

  He did not even smile, for he was dying.

  Man’s achievement of a bipedal gait has freed

  His hands for tools, weapons and the embrace.

  the days will be lengthening

  into centuries, Solange

  and neither witness will be there,

  seek no comparisons among

  dolls’ houses of the rational mind

  coevals don’t compare

  a gesture broken off by dusk

  heartless as boredom is or hope

  blood seeks the soil it has to soak

  in the fulfilment of a scope

  fibres of consciousness will grow

  lavish as any coffin load

  and every touching entity

  the puritan grave will swallow up

  the silences will atrophy.

  So we came, riding through the soft lithograph

  Of Paris in the rain, the spires

  Empting their light, the mercury falling,

  Streets draining into the sewers,

  The yokel clockface of the Gare de Lyon

  On a warehouse wall the word ‘Imputrescible’

  Then slowly night: but suddenly

  The station was full of special trains,

  Long hospital trains with red crosses

  Drawn blinds, uniformed nurses, doctors.

  Dimly as fish in tanks moved pyjama-clad figures

  Severed from the world, one would have said

  Fresh from catastrophe, a great battlefield.

  ‘O well the war has come’ she said with resignation.

  But it was only the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes,

  The crippled the lame the insane the halt

  All heading southwards towards the hopeless miracle.

  Each one felt himself the outside chance,

  Thousands of sick outsiders.

  A barrel organ played a rotting waltz.

  The Government was determined to root out gambling.

  My path was not this one; but it equally needed

  A sense of goodbye. Firm handclasp of hard little paw,

  The clasp of faithful business associates, and

  ‘When you come back, you know where to find me.’

  four steps up

  four steps down

  the station ramp eludes

  the mangy town

  the temporary visa

  with the scarlet stamp

  flowers of soda

  shower the quays

  engines piss hot spume

  giants in labour

  drip and sweat like these

  slam the carriage door

  only this and nothing more.

  I write these lines towards dusk

  On the other side of the world,

  A country with stranger inhabitants,

  Chestnut candles, fevers, and white water.

  Such small perplexities as vex the mind,

  Solange, became for writers precious to growth,

  But the fluttering sails disarm them,

  Wet petals sticking to a sky born nude.

  The magnitudes, insights, fears and proofs

  Were your unconscious gift. They still weigh

  With the weight of Paris forever hanging

  White throat wearing icy gems,

  A parody of stars as yet undiscovered.

  Here they tell me I have come to terms.

  But supposing I had chosen to march on you

  Instead of on such a star—what then?

  Instead of this incubus of infinite duration,

  I mean to say, whose single glance

  Brings loving to its knees?

  Yes, wherever the ant-hills empty

  Swarm the fecund associations, crossing

  And recrossing the sky-pathways of sleep.

  We labour only to be relatively

  Sincere as ants perhaps are sincere.

  Yet always the absolute vision must keep

  The healthy lodestar of its stake in love.

  You’ll see somewhere always the crystal body

  Transparent, held high against the light

  Blaze like a diamond in the deep.

  How can a love of life be ever indiscreet

  For even in that far dispersing city today

  Ants must turn over in their sleep.

  1980/1969

  THE RECKONING

  For Miriam Cendrars

  Later some of these heroic worshippers

  May live out one thrift in a world of options,

  The crown of thorns, the bridal wreath of love,

  Desires in all their motions.

  ‘As below, darling, so above.’

  In one thought focus and resume

  The thousand contradictions,

  And still with a sigh these warring fictions.

  Timeless as water into language flowing,

  Molten as snow on new burns,

  The limbo of half-knowing

  Where the gagged conscience twists and turns,

  Will plant the flag of their unknowing.

  It is not peace we seek but meaning.

  To convince at last that all is possible,

  That the feeble human finite must belong

  Within the starred circumference of wonder,

  And waking alone at night so suddenly

  Realise how careful one must be with hate—

  For you become what you hate too much,

  As when you love too much you fraction

  By insolence the fine delight …

  It is not meaning that we need but sight.

  1973/1971

  NOBODY

  You and who else?

  Who else? Why Nobody.

  I shall be weeks or months away now

  Where the diving roads divide,

  A solitude with little dignity,

  Where forests lie, where rivers pine,

  In a great hemisphere of loveless sky:

  And your letters will cross mine.

&
nbsp; Somewhere perhaps in a cobweb of skyscrapers

  Between Fifth and Sixth musing I’ll go,

  Matching some footprints in young snow,

  Within the loving ambush of some heart,

  So close and yet so very far apart …

  I don’t know, I just don’t know.

  Two beings watching the skyscrapers fade,

  Rose in the falling sleet or

  Phantom green, licking themselves

  Like great cats at their toilet,

  Licking their paws clean.

  I shall hesitate and falter, that much I know.

  Moreover, do you suppose, you too

  When you reach India at last, as you will,

  I’ll be back before two empty coffee cups

  And your empty chair in our shabby bistro;

  You’ll have nothing to tell me either, no,

  Not the tenth part of a sigh to exchange.

  Everything will be just so.

  I’ll be back alone again

  Confined in memory, but nothing to report,

  Watching the traffic pass and

  Dreaming of footprints in the New York snow.

  1973/1971

  RAIN, RAIN, GO TO SPAIN

  That noise will be the rain again,

  Hush-falling absolver of together—

  Companionable enough, though, here abroad:

  The log fire, some conclusive music, loneliness.

  I can visualise somebody at the door

  But make no name or shape for such an image,

  Just a locus for small thefts

  As might love us both awake tomorrow,

  An echo off the lead and ownerless.

  But this hissing rain won’t improve anything.

  The roads will be washed out. Thinking falters.

  My book-lined walls so scholarly,

  So rosy, glassed in by the rain.

  I finger the sex of many an uncut book.

  Now spring is coming you will get home

  Later and later in another climate.

  You vanished so abruptly it took me by surprise.

  I heard to relearn everything again

  As if blinded by a life of tiny braille.

  Then a whole year with just one card,

  From Madrid. ‘It is raining here and

  Greco is so sombre. I have decided

  At last to love nobody but myself.’

  I repeat it in an amused way

  Sometimes very late at night.

  In an amazed way as anyone might

  Looking up from a classic into all the

  Marvellous rain-polished darkness.

  As if suddenly you had gone

  Beyond the twelfth desire:

  You and memory both become

  Contemporary to all this inner music.

  Time to sift out our silences, then:

  Time to repair the failing fire.

  1973/1971

  APHROS MEANING SPUME

  Aphros Aphrodite the sperm-born one

  Could not collect her longings, she had only one,

  Soft as a lettuce to the sound,

  A captive of one light and longing

  Driven underground.

  Sadness is only a human body

  Seeking the arbitration of heaven,

  In the wrong places, under the rose,

  In the unleavened leaven.

  Tell what wistful kisses travel

  Over the skin-heaven of the mind

  To where an amor fati waits

  With fangs drawn back, to bleed

  Whoever she can find.

  But vines lay no eggs, honey,

  And even apostles come to their senses

  Sooner or later you may find.

  The three Themes of this witchcraft

  Are roses, faeces and vampires.

  May they bring you a level mind.

  1973/1971

  A WINTER OF VAMPIRES

  From a winter of vampires he selects one,

  Takes her to a dark house, undresses her:

  It is not at all how the story-books say

  But another kind of reversed success.

  A transaction where the words themselves

  Begin to bleed first and everything else follows.

  The dissolution of the egg

  In the mind of the lady suggests new

  Paths to follow, less improbable victories,

  Just as illusory as the old, I fear.

  Well, but when the embraces go astray,

  When you finger the quick recipes

  Of every known suggestion, why,

  The whole prosperity of the flesh may be in question.

  1973/1971

  FAUSTUS

  As for him, he’ll die one day for sure.

  But you, you’ll turn into a word.

  How pathless the waters of language!

  Now others will speak this word aloud,

  Others constrain you with this noun.

  There are purchases in the mind

  For such a word, at once vulnerable

  Yet strong to take root. Wait and see.

  It might be something a dead Greek

  Felt about sirens or a Pythia,

  One sole sound in the huge glossary

  Of whispers, the code of love….

  Then, after, with death forfeited,

  To melt upon the silence of the tongue,

  A Margaret or a second Helen,

  Half-dreaded hauntress of the waking dream.

  1980/1971

  PISTOL WEATHER

  About loving, and such kindred matters

  You could be beguiling enough;

  Delicacy, constancy and depth—

  We examined every artificial prison,

  And all with the necessary sincerity, yes.

  Some languages have little euphemisms

  Which modify suddenly one’s notions,

  Alter one’s whole way of adoring:

  Such as your character for ‘death’,

  Which reads simply ‘A stepping forever

  Into a whiteness without remission.’

  With no separation-anxiety I presume?

  Surely to love is to coincide a little?

  And after I contracted your own mightier

  Loneliness, I became really ill myself.

  But grateful for the thorny knowledge of you;

  And thank you for the choice of time and place.

  I would perhaps have asked you away

  To my house by the sea, to revive us both,

  In absolute solitude and dispassionately,

  But all the time I kept seeing the severed head,

  Lying there, eyes open, in your lap.

  1973/1971

  LAKE MUSIC

  Deep waters hereabouts.

  We could quit caring.

  Deep waters darling

  We could stop feeling,

  You could stop sharing

  But neither knife nor gun

  From the pockets of mischance pointing;

  How slowly we all sink down

  This lustful anointing

  Ankles first and thighs.

  The beautiful grenades

  Breasts up to lips and eyes

  The vertebrae of believing

  And the deep water moving

  We could abandon supposing

  We could quit knowing

  Where we have come from

  Where we are going.

  1973/1971

  STOIC

  I, a slave, chained to an oar of poem,

  Inhabiting this faraway province where

  Nothing happens. I wouldn’t want it to.

  I have expressly deprived myself of much:

  Conversation, sweets of friendship, love …

  The public women of the town don’t appeal.

  I wouldn’t want them to. There are no others,

  At least for an old, smelly, covetous bookman.

  So many
things might have fed this avocation,

  But what’s the point? It’s too late.

  About the matter of death I am convinced,

  Also that peace is unattainable and destiny

  Impermeable to reason. I am lucky to have

  No grave illness, I suppose, no wounds

  To ache all winter. I do not drink or smoke.

  From all these factors I select one, the silence

  Which is that jewel of divine futility,

  Refusal to bow, the unvarnished grain

  Of the mind’s impudence: you see it so well

  On the faces of self-reliant dead.

  1973/1971

  ?

  Waters rebribing a new moon are all

  Dissenting mirrors ending in themselves.

  Go away, leave me alone.

  Someone still everywhere nearby

  So full of fervent need the mouth

  The jewelry of smiling: a confession,

  Tidemarks of old intentions’ dying fall,

  Surely that is all now, that is all?

  People don’t want the experience

  Any more: they want an explanation,

  How you go about it, when and why.

  But all you can say is: Look, it’s manifest

  And nobody’s to blame: it has no name.

  Spades touch a buried city,

  Calm bodies suffocated by ashes

  It happened so quickly there was no time,

  Their minds were overrun

  The sentry stiffened over a jammed gun,

  And waters bribing a new moon are all

  The flesh’s memories beyond recall.

  The voice may have come from a cloud

  But more likely the garden’s wet planes

  A bird or a woman calling in the mist

  Asking if anything remains, and if so

  Which witch? Which witch? Witch!

  I am the only one who knows.

  1973/1971