Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online Page A

harbours of the heart,
    For scholars sitting at their fire-lit puzzles,
    The three-fold climate and the anchorage.
    Make in the dormitory of the self
    For sleepless murders combing out the blood
    A blessing and an armistice to fear.
    Though bankers pile debentures to the worm,
    And death like Sunday only brings the owls
    Though some must founder trying for the rock,
    Bless mice and women in their secret places.
V
    To you in high heaven the unattainable,
    The surnamed Virgin, I lift a small scripture,
    Brushed by the quill of a black boy’s madness;
    Pour one sweet drop of mercy on the mind!
    You three, being holy and great linguists,
    The oval singers of the Cretan eikon,
    Give to the ghost your charity’s ghostly shirt,
    Defence by pity and a green captivity.
    Consider: here the thorn crawled in the heart,
    Here traitors laid an axe upon the root.
    Grant like a bruise his sweetest homecoming,
    Find laughing Hamlet sitting in a tree,
    The silken duchess frowning at her baubles,
    And swart Ophelia crooning at her lauds.
VI
    Winter and love are Euclid’s properties.
    The charm of candles smoking on a coffin
    Like nursery years upon a birthday cake,
    Teach, like the soft declensions of the term,
    How dust being sifted from the sheet of nuns,
    Returns beneath the swollen veil once more,
    So women bend like trees and utter figs,
    And children from their pillows prophesy.
    The unnumbered garrison still holds the womb.
    O suffer the mirages of the dazed ladies,
    Give love with all its tributary patience
    That when the case of bones is broken open,
    The heart can bless, or the sad skin of saints
    Be beaten into drum-heads for the truth.
VII
    Walk upon dreams, and pass behind the book.
    Hamlet is nailed between the thieves of love.
    Wear the black waistcoat, boy, for death is king,
    His margin is a waxen candle-dip at night:
    By day a grace-note in the mid of silence,
    The gambler smiling in his royal sheet.
    For this I put the obol in the lips.
    For this I wear my sex beneath a towel.
    I take the round skull of the nunnery girl
    To bless until the tears break in the brain;
    As those who by the Babylonian fable
    Hung up their piercing harps beside the waters,
    I hang my heart, being choked, upon a noun.
    I hang her name upon this frantic pothook.
VIII
    I close an hinge on the memorial days.
    I perch my pity on an alp of silence.
    Cold water took my pretty by the beard,
    Flatter than glass she blew to the tongueless zone.
    I learn now from nightingale on the spit
    The science of the cowl and killing-bottle.
    I hum now the harsh tune of the too finite swan,
    Piping behind the ambush of my guilt.
    My comfort smiled on me and gave me flowers:
    Freckles, as on a sparrow’s egg, and quiet faces.
    The water strips her humour like a bean.
    Barbarian ladies with their fingernails,
    Strip off her simple reason like a wedding-dress.
    She turns upon the pedals of her prison.
IX
    Pain hangs more bloody than the mystic’s taws.
    Down corridors of pain I follow patience,
    Make notes behind the nerve-ends of the brain.
    Lean, lean on the iron elbow of the armoured man,
    Button the nipples on his coat of mercy,
    The widow walking in a rubber mask!
    Your murderer’s napkin hangs upon a bush,
    And the king who stiffens in a shirt of blood,
    Too good, too grave to number with the crumbs,
    Can leave an incubus to this winter castle.
    Shoot back the lips like bolts upon your grace.
    Make thimble of the mouth to suck your fly.
    I cool my spittle on the smoking hook.
    I take these midnight thoughts between a tong.
X
    As husband is laid down beside the lute,
    Widow and minstrel in a single cerement,
    So I on the plinth of passing, shall I marry
    The lunatic image in the raven frock?
    The curved meridian of hazard like a bow
    Paints on the air the dark tree of my death
    Gums without ivory for the skeletal smile:
    A natal joker squeaking in his crib.
    Here birth and death are knitted by a vowel.
    A mariner must sail his crew of