Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell

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  robot27 августа 2015 г.

  Stone Honey
  Reading him is to refresh all nature,
  Where, newly elaborated, reality attends.
  The primal innocence in things confronting
  His eye as thoughtful, innocence as unstudied...
  One could almost say holy in the scientific sense.
  So while renewing nature he relives for us
  The simple things our inattention staled,
  Noting sagely how water can curl like hair,
  Its undisciplined recoil moving mountains
  Or drumming out geysers in the earth's crust,
  Or the reflex stroke which buries ancient cities.

  But water was only one of the things Leonardo
  Was keen on, liked to sit down and draw.
  It would not stay still; and sitting there beside
  The plate of olives, the comb of stone honey,
  Which seemed so eternal in the scale of values,
  So philosophically immortal, he was touched
  By the sense of time's fragility, the semen of fate.
  The adventitious seconds, days or seasons,
  Though time stood still some drowsy afternoon,
  Became for him dense, gravid with futurity.
  Life was pitiless after all, advancing and recoiling
  Like the seas of the mind. The only purchase was
  This, deliberately to make the time to note:
  "The earth is budged from its position by the
  Meres weight of a little bird alighting on it."

  Leonardo, Old Man with Water Studies, c. 1513
  

  Honeystone (mellite)
  

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  robot24 августа 2015 г.

  On First Looking into Loeb's Horace
  I found your Horace with the writing in it;
  Out of time and context came upon
  This lover of vines and slave to quietness,
  Walking like a figure of smoke here, musing
  Among his high and lovely Tuscan pines.

  All the small-holder's ambitions, the yield
  Of wine-bearing grape, pruning and drainage
  Laid out by laws, almost like the austere
  Shell of his verses — a pattern of Latin thrift;
  Waiting so patiently in a library for
  Autumn and drying of the apples;
  The betraying hour-glass and its deathward drift.

  Surely the hard blue winterset
  Must have conveyed a message to him —
  The premonitions that the garden heard
  Shrunk in its shirt of hair beneath the stars,
  How rude and feeble a tenant was the self ,
  An Empire, the body with its members dying —
  And unwhistling now the vanished Roman bird?

  The fruit-trees dropping apples; he counted them;
  The soft bounding fruit on leafy terraces,
  And turned to the consoling winter rooms
  Where, facing south, began the great prayer,
  With his reed laid upon the margins
  Of the dead, his stainless authors,
  Upright, severe on an uncomfortable chair.

  Here, where your clear hand marked up
  "The hatred cypress" I added "Because it grew
  On tombs, revealed his fear of autumn and the urns",
  Depicting a solitary at an upper window
  Revising metaphors for the winter sea: "O
  Dark head of storm-tossed curls"; or silently
  Watching the North Star which like a fever burns
  Away the envy and neglect of the common,
  Shining on this terrace, lifting up in recreation
  The sad heart of Horace who must have seen it only
  As a metaphor for the self and its perfection —
  A burning heart quite constant in its station.

  Easy to be patient in the summer,
  The light running like fishes among the leaves,
  Easy in August with its cones of blue
  Sky uninvaded from the north; but winter
  With its bareness pared his words to points
  Like stars, leaving them pure but few.

  He will not know how we discerned him, disregarding
  The pose of sufficiency, the landed man,
  Found a suffering limb on the great Latin tree
  Whose roots live in the barbarian grammar we
  Use, yet based in him, his mason's tongue;
  Describing clearly a bachelor, sedentary,
  With a fond weakness for bronze-age conversation,
  Disguising a sense of failure in a hatred for the young,

  Who built in the Sabine hills this forgery
  Of completeness, an orchard with a view of Rome;
  Who studiously developed his sense of death
  Till it was all around him, walking at the circus,
  At the baths, playing dominoes in a shop —
  The escape from self-knowledge with its tragic
  Imperatives: Seek, suffer, endure. The Roman
  In him feared the Law and told him where to stop.

  So perfect a disguise for one who had
  Exhausted death in art — yet, who could guess.
  You would discern the liar by a line,
  The suffering hidden under gentleness
  And add upon the flyleaf in your tall
  Clear hand: "Fat, human and unloved,
  And held from loving by a sort of wall,
  Laid down his books and lovers one by one,
  Indifference and success had crowned them all."

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  robot28 августа 2015 г.

  Vaumort*
  For "Buttons"
  Seemingly upended in the sky,
  Cloudless as minds asleep
  One careless cemetery buzzes on and on
  As if her tombstones were all hives
  Overturned by the impatient dead —
  We imagined they had stored up
  The honey of their immortality
  In the soft commotion the black bees make.

  Below us, far away, the road to Paris.
  You pour some wine upon a tomb.
  The bees drink with us, the dead approve.

  It is weeks ago now and we are back
  In our burnt and dusty Languedoc,
  Yet often in the noon-silences
  I hear the Vaumort bees, taste the young wine,
  Catch a smile hidden in sighs.

  In the long grass you found a ring, remember?
  A child's toy ring. Yes, I know that whenever
  I want to be perfectly alone
  With the memory of you, of that whole day
  It's the Vaumort that I'll be turning.

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