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