Gorged with your bitter flesh,
Drunk with your Virgin Mother’s lullaby.
Little slender lad, lightning engendered,
Grand master of magicians:
When pirates stole you at Icaria
Wild ivy gripped their rigging, every oar
Changed to a serpent, panthers held the poop,
A giant vine sprouted from the mast crotch
And overboard they plunged, the whey-faced crew!
Lead us with your song, tall Queen of earth!
Twinned to the god, I follow comradely
Through a first rainbow-limbo, webbed in white,
Through chill Tyrrhenian grottoes, under water,
Where dolphins wallow between marble rocks,
Through sword-bright jungles, tangles of unease,
Through halls of fear ceilinged with incubi,
Through blazing treasure-chambers walled with garnet,
Through domes pillared with naked Caryatids –
Then mount at last on wings into pure air,
Peering down with regal eye upon
Five-fruited orchards of Elysium,
In perfect knowledge of all knowledges.
And still she drowsily chants
From her invisible bower of stars.
Gentle her voice, her notes come linked together
In intricate golden chains paid out
Slowly across brocaded cramoisy,
Or unfold like leaves from the jade-green shoot
Of a rising bush whose blossoms are her tears….
O, whenever she pauses, my heart quails
Until the sound renews.
Little slender lad, little secret god,
Pledge her your faith in me,
Who have ambrosia eaten and yet live.
THE UNNAMED SPELL
Let us never name that royal certitude,
That simultaneous recognition
When first we stood together,
When I saw you as a child astonished,
Years before, under tall trees
By a marching sound of wind:
Your heart sown with a headlong wisdom
Which every grief or joy thereafter
Rooted still more strongly.
Naming is treacherous, names divide
Truth into lesser truths, enclosing them
In a coffin of counters –
Give the spell no name, liken it only
To the more than tree luxuriating
Seven ells above earth:
All heal, golden surprise of a kiss,
Wakeful glory while the grove winters,
A branch Hell-harrowing,
Of no discoverable parentage,
Strangeling scion of varied stocks
Yet true to its own leaf,
Secret of secrets disclosed only
To who already share it,
Who themselves sometimes raised an arch –
Pillared with honour; its lintel, love –
And passed silently through.
From Man Does, Woman Is
(1964)
A TIME OF WATTING
The moment comes when my sound senses
Warn me to keep the pot at a quiet simmer,
Conclude no rash decisions, enter into
No random friendships, check the runaway tongue
And fix my mind in a close caul of doubt –
Which is more difficult, maybe, than to face
Night-long assaults of lurking furies.
The pool lies almost empty; I watch it nursed
By a thin stream. Such idle intervals
Are from waning moon to the new – a moon always
Holds the cords of my heart. Then patience, hands;
Dabble your nerveless fingers in the shallows;
A time shall come when she has need of them.
EXPECT NOTHING
Give, ask for nothing, hope for nothing,
Subsist on crumbs, though scattered casually
Not for you (she smiles) but for the birds.
Though only a thief’s diet, it staves off
Dire starvation, nor does she grow fat
On the bread she crumbles, while the lonely truth
Of love is honoured, and her word pledged.
NO LETTER
Be angry yourself, as well you may,
But why with her? She is no party to
Those avaricious dreams that pester you.
Why knot your fists as though plotting to slay
Even our postman George (whose only due
Is a small Christmas box on Christmas Day)
If his delivery does not raise the curse
Of doubt from your impoverished universe?
THE WHY OF THE WEATHER
Since no one knows the why of the weather
Or can authoritatively forecast
More than twelve hours of day or night, at most,
Every poor fool is licensed to explain it
As Heaven’s considered judgement on mankind,
And I to account for its vagaries, Myrto,
By inklings of your unaccountable mind.
IN TIME
In time all undertakings are made good,
All cruelties remedied,
Each bond resealed more firmly than before –
Befriend us, Time, Love’s gaunt executor!
FIRE WALKER
To be near her is to be near the furnace.
Fortunate boy who could slip idly through,
Basket in hand, culling the red-gold blossom,
Then wander on, untaught that flowers were flame,
With no least smell of scorching on his clothes!
I, at a greater distance, charred to coal,
Earn her reproach for my temerity.
DEED OF GIFT
After close, unembittered meditation
She gave herself to herself, this time for good;
Body and heart re-echoed gratitude
For such a merciful repudiation
Of debts claimed from them by the neighbourhood –
Not only friends, and friends of friends, but lovers
Whom in the circumstances few could blame
(Her beauty having singed them like a flame)
If they had hoarded under legal covers
Old promissory notes signed with her name.
And though to stand once more on the firm road
From which by misadventure she had strayed,
So that her journey was that much delayed,
Justified the default of duties owed,
What debt of true love did she leave unpaid?
AT BEST, POETS
Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters,
And watchful fingers:
We claim no magic comparable to hers –
At best, poets; at worst, sorcerers.
SHE IS NO LIAR
She is no liar, yet she will wash away
Honey from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand,
And, dressed at dawn in clean white robes will say,
Trusting the ignorant world to understand:
‘Such things no longer are; this is today.’
A LAST POEM
A last poem, and a very last, and yet another –
O, when can I give over?
Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails
And my breath fails and I shake with fever,
Or sit well wrapped in a many-coloured cloak
Where the moon shines new through Castle Crystal?
Shall I never hear her whisper softly:
‘But this is truth written by you only,
And for me only; therefore, love, have done’?
THE PEARL
When, wounded by her anger at some trifle,
I imitate the oyster, rounding out
A ball of nacre about the intrusive grit,
Why should she charge me with perversity
As one
rejoicing in his own torn guts
Or in the lucent pearl resultant
Which she disdainfully strings for her neck?
Such anger I admire; but could she swear
That I am otherwise incorrigible?
THE LEAP
Forget the rest: my heart is true
And in its waking thought of you
Gives the same wild and sudden leap
That jerks it from the brink of sleep.
BANK ACCOUNT
Never again remind me of it:
There are no debts between us.
Though silences, half-promises, evasions
Curb my impatient spirit
And freeze the regular currency of love,
They do not weaken credit. Must I demand
Sworn attestations of collateral,
Forgetting how you looked when first you opened
Our joint account at the Bank of Fate?
JUDGEMENT OF PARIS
What if Prince Paris, after taking thought,
Had not adjudged the apple to Aphrodite
But, instead, had favoured buxom Hera,
Divine defendress of the marriage couch?
What if Queen Helen had been left to squander
Her beauty upon the thralls of Menelaus,
Hector to die unhonoured in his bed,
Penthesileia to hunt a poorer quarry,
The bards to celebrate a meaner siege?
Could we still have found the courage, you and I,
To embark together for Cranaë
And consummate our no less fateful love?
MAN DOES, WOMAN IS
Studiously by lamp-light I appraised
The palm of your hand, its heart-line
Identical with its head-line;
And you appraised the approving frown.
I spread my cards face-upwards on the table,
Not challenging you for yours.
Man does; but woman is –
Can a gamester argue with his luck?
THE AMPLE GARDEN
However artfully you transformed yourself
Into bitch, vixen, tigress,
I knew the woman behind.
Light as a bird now, you descend at dawn
From the poplar bough or ivy bunch
To peck my strawberries,
And have need indeed of an ample garden:
All my fruits, fountains, arbours, lawns
In fief to your glory.
You, most unmetaphorically you:
Call me a Catholic, so devout in faith
I joke of love, as Catholics do of God,
And scorn all exegesis.
TO MYRTO ABOUT HERSELF
Fierce though your love of her may be,
What man alive can doubt
I love her more? Come now, agree
Not to turn rivalrous of me,
Lest you and I fall out!
And should her law make little sense
Even at times to you,
Love has its own sure recompense:
To love beyond all reason – hence
Her fondness for us two.
What she pursues we neither know
Nor can we well inquire;
But if you carelessly bestow
A look on me she did not owe
It comes at her desire.
THE THREE-FACED
Who calls her two-faced? Faces, she has three:
The first inscrutable, for the outer world;
The second shrouded in self-contemplation;
The third, her face of love,
Once for an endless moment turned on me.
DAZZLE OF DARKNESS
The flame guttered, flared impossibly high,
Went out for good; yet in the dazzle of darkness
I saw her face ashine like an angel’s:
Beauty too memorable for lamentation,
Though doomed to rat and maggot.
MYRRHINA
O, why judge Myrrhina
As though she were a man?
She obeys a dark wisdom
(As Eve did before her)
Which never can fail,
Being bound by no pride
Of armorial bearings
Bequeathed in tail male.
And though your blood brother
Who dared to do you wrong
In his greed of Myrrhina
Might plead a like wisdom
The fault to excuse,
Myrrhina is just:
She has hanged the poor rogue
By the neck from her noose.
FOOD OF THE DEAD
Blush as you stroke the curves – chin, lips and brow –
Of your scarred face, Prince Orpheus: for she has called it
Beautiful, nor would she stoop to flattery.
Yet are you patient still, when again she has eaten
Food of the dead, seven red pomegranate seeds,
And once more warmed the serpent at her thighs
For a new progress through new wards of hell?
EURYDICE
‘I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed’ –
Once I utter the curse, how can she rest:
No longer able, weeping, to placate me
With renewed auguries of celestial beauty?
Speak, fly in her amber ring; speak, horse of gold!
What gift did I ever grudge her, or help withhold?
In a mirror I watch blood trickling down the wall –
Is it mine? Yet still I stand here, proud and tall.
Look where she shines, with a borrowed blaze of light
Among the cowardly, faceless, lost, unright,
Clasping a naked imp to either breast –
Am I not oppressed, oppressed, three times oppressed?
She has gnawn at corpse-flesh till her breath stank,
Paired with a jackal, grown distraught and lank,
Crept home, accepted solace, but then again
Flown off to chain truth back with an iron chain.
My own dear heart, dare you so war on me
As to strangle love in a mad perversity?
Is ours a fate can ever be forsworn
Though my lopped head sing to the yet unborn?
TO BEGUILE AND BETRAY
To beguile and betray, though pardonable in women,
Slowly quenches the divine need-fire
By true love kindled in them. Have you not watched
The immanent Goddess fade from their brows
When they make private to her mysteries
Some whip-scarred rogue from the hulks, some painted clown
From the pantomime – and afterwards accuse you
Of jealous hankering for the mandalot
Rather than horror and sick foreboding
That she will never return to the same house?
I WILL WRITE
He had done for her all that a man could,
And, some might say, more than a man should.
Then was ever a flame so recklessly blown out
Or a last goodbye so negligent as this?
‘I will write to you,’ she muttered briefly,
Tilting her cheek for a polite kiss;
Then walked away, nor ever turned about….
Long letters written and mailed in her own head –
There are no mails in a city of the dead.
BIRD OF PARADISE
At sunset, only to his true love,
The bird of paradise opened wide his wings
Displaying emerald plumage shot with gold
Unguessed even by him.
True, that wide crest
Had blazoned royal estate, and the tropic flowers
Through which he flew had shown example
Of what brave colours gallantry might flaunt,
But these were other. She asked herself, trembling:
‘What did I do to awake such glory?’
THE METAPHOR
The act of love s
eemed a dead metaphor
For love itself, until the timeless moment
When fingers trembled, heads clouded,
And love rode everywhere, too numinous
To be expressed or greeted calmly:
O, then it was, deep in our own forest,
We dared revivify the metaphor,
Shedding the garments of this epoch
In scorn of time’s wilful irrelevancy;
So at last understood true nakedness
And the long debt to silence owed.
SECRECY
Lovers are happy
When favoured by chance,
But here is blessedness
Beyond all happiness,
Not to be gainsaid
By any gust of chance,
Harvest of one vine,
Gold from the same mine:
To keep which sacred
Demands a secrecy
That the world might blame
As deceit and shame;
Yet to publish which
Would make a him and her
Out of me and you
That were both untrue.
Let pigeons couple
Brazenly on the bough,
But royal stag and hind
Are of our own mind.
JOSEPH AND MARY
They turned together with a shocked surprise –
He, old and fabulous; she, young and wise –
Both having heard a newborn hero weep
In convalescence from the stroke of sleep.
AN EAST WIND
Beware the giddy spell, ground fallen away
Under your feet, wings not yet beating steady:
An ignorant East Wind tempts you to deny
Faith in the twofold glory of your being –
You with a thousand leagues or more to fly.
‘Poised in air between earth and paradise,
Paradise and earth, confess which pull
Do you find the stronger? Is it of homesickness
Or of passion? Would you be rather loyal or wise?
How are these choices reconcilable?’
Turn from him without anger. East Wind knows
Only one wall of every foursquare house,