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

furies
    Beyond the hook of hazard to the oceanic lands.
    His prayers will bubble up before the throne.
    I, now, go, where the soliloquy of the sad bee
    O numbs the nettles and the hieroglyphic stone.
XI
    On the stone sill of the embalming winter
    I tell my malady by the wheel and the berry,
    The hunters making their necklace on the hills.
    The escaping dead hang frozen down like flags,
    A breathing frost upon the eyeball lens
    Blooms like still poison in a dish of quinces.
    Spawn of the soft, the unwrinkled womb of queens,
    I add my number to the world’s defeated,
    I learn the carrion’s scientific torpor,
    The five-day baby swollen with its gases,
    The nun who fell from the ladder of Jacob.
    My love hangs longer than the tongue of hound.
    I kneel at the keyhole of death’s private room
    To meet His eye, enormous in the keyhole.
XII
    This pain goes deeper than the fish’s fathom.
    Peel me an olive-branch and hold it shining:
    You have Ophelia smiling at her chess,
    The suit of love gored by the courtier’s fang.
    You have my mother folded like a rag,
    Whiter than piano-keys the canine smile.
    The marble statues bleed if she walks by,
    Pacing the margins of the chequerboard
    Where the soft rabbit and her man in black
    Play move for move, the pawn against the prince.
    O men have made cradles of their loving fingers
    To rock my youth, and I have slipped between,
    Led like the magi to the child’s foul crib,
    To hear my hands nailed up between two thieves.
XIII
    Then walk where roses like disciples can
    Aim at the heart their innocent attention.
    Where the apostle-spring beneath the cover
    Of throstle and dove, loves in his green asylum.
    Time shall bestow a pupil to the nipple,
    A red and popular baby born for the urn.
    For him I make a book by the moving finger-bone,
    A rattle, cap and comedy of queens.
    Then suckle the weather if the winter will not,
    Seal down a message in a dream of spring,
    More than this painful meditation of feet,
    The frigid autist pacing out his rope.
    The candle and the lexicon have picked your bones.
    The tallow spills upon my endless bible.
XIV
    To you by whom the sweet spherical music
    Makes in heaven a tree-stringed oracle,
    I bend a sonnet like a begging-bowl,
    And hang my tabor from the greenest willow-wand.
    Give to the rufus sons of Pudding Island
    The stainless sheet of a European justice,
    That death’s pure canon smiling in the trees
    Can lure the fabulous lion from his walks.
    My ash I dress to dance upon the void,
    My mercy in a wallet like a berry bright,
    And when hemp sings of murder bless your boy,
    The double fellow in the labyrinth,
    Whose maps were stifled with him in the maze,
    Whose mother dropped him like the seedless pod.
    1943/ 1939

THE SERMON
    From A Verse Play
    [Now the Prompter will come before the curtain and speak the following lines. He must not recite this address, but deliver it in the manner of one making an intimate speech to friends.]
    Ladies and gentlemen: or better still,
    Men and women: or best, perhaps, of all,
    My children: for we speak to the child under the title
    Of players acting a play which is not the less life
    For being enacted: not the less a play for being lived
    On both sides of the lamp, under ordinary coats.
    Understanding is a neuter gift which lies between
    The mind and the heart, to neither absolute.
    To understand is to become wholly aware, to become holy,
    To stand between the causal and the casual
    As Darwin stands grinning, between two types of ape,
    As the angel stood with the knife of sex and division,
    As Hamlet for all time in the helmet of the prince.
    So many shadows lie between all of us here:
    Between I, an actor, and the live men on the stage:
    Between I, the actor, and you who are playing at life.
    I would be glad to reach out among your imaginations
    And touch the walker on water, your inmost saints,
    But thought, like sex, is only the rubbing of two
    Sticks, making only a fire by which to consume