Late Harvest: Poetry

Showing posts with label Poetry. Show all posts

Friday, January 22, 2010

Love All in Colonial Algeria

Love All in Colonial Algeria[1]

‘Infandum, regina, iubes me renovare dolorem.’ (Virgil, Aeneid)[2]

‘Tout va sous terre et rentre dans le jeu.’ (Valery, Le Cimetière Marini)[3]

Years ago, when the moon rose like a huge grapefruit

Over Ain el Nur, and the cicada orchestra

Was playing fortissimo to bored prickly pears,

I sprawled among black pine trees as the sea

Toujours recommencée,[4]

Sullenly repeated its French lessons,

To the nearby cemetery.

Nestled beside me, Rachel, in whispers,

Spoke of a Nazi finishing-school

Specializing in final solutions

For problems her smart, Jewish family

Had once dismissed as Nietzschean insanity,

Stage thunder from Bayreuth,[5]

Till the mad painter turned engraver,

Cracked architect of ruin,

Leapt out of drunken Munich

To cavort among corpses.

She alone had made it to Spain;

Franco proved friendlier than her Gauleiter.[6]

The thud of tennis balls, my liege,[7]

Drifted from the moonlit court

Where Negus[8], our black prince,

Was smashing his partner, like Othello,

With Moorish efficiency.

‘Love all,’ someone kept calling through the dark.

Love all? Had we heard aright?

Night and mist[9] had surely distorted the message.

That score was impossible, I told her firmly,

It had been tried and failed,

It meant nothing more than Zero,

Le Néant of Sartre,

As she, of all people, should know.

I was right, of course,

Learning later, to my cost,

Right or wrong have nothing to do with love.

Life was wide-eyed and childish there,

Sea and sun marked our unsullied days.

Rachel was wiser than I that night,

Rabbinically, as stars wheeled down to dawn,

For she smelt blood, where I smelt only pine-sap;

Smoke, where I drank the fragrance of her hair;

And the sighing of wind in the pines above us

Was the dead whispering Kaddish[10] for each other

Among Polish ash-heaps.

Yet she still believed ‘Love all’ was possible,

(Your neighbour, God, creation, death itself).

My Anglo-Saxon attitudes eluded her,

Bizarre as cricket, puzzling as Eton fives,

As her Sephardic love eluded me[11].

The Hebrew prophetess

Had spoken true.

Ten murderous years later,

The lycee[12] was the haunt of owls and rats,

And civil war, uncivil, broke the state.

Pierre, whose Being combated the Void,

Michelle, whose wild hair never could be tamed,

Sultry Simone, renowned for hot embraces,

Marie-Rose, longing for Alpine snows,

Dainty Azizah, afraid of losing her looks,

(The thoughtful paras[13] set her mind at rest),

Rachel, enraptured under the soughing pines,

Even Monsieur le Proviseur,[14]

Our scholarly headmaster,

With his Legion d’Honneur and Resistance medals,

And the rest of them, Arabs, French alike,

Were raped, mutilated, tortured,

Wounded, blown to pieces,

Dead, bad, mad,

Or dangerous to know.[15]

Negus, died in a cellar in Algiers,

Among rats and fetters, game to the every end,

Though the paras smashed him repeatedly

Without once mentioning Love,

Before he slipped away

From their nets to another court

In a sudden, sharp volley.

Cut down like summer grass by sharpened scythe,

Rachel is lost among the black-beaked pines.

Blind larva creep where tears used to form.[16]

Shema Yisra’el.[17]

Gull-winged, I fled the coming storm.

Lolling sybaritically on esparto-grass,

On an Estonian tramp-steamer

Anchored off Gibraltar at night,

With the scent of orange-blossom drifting across the waters,

Evoking Molly Bloom’s young love,[18]

While the first mate told me how the Russians had violated his sisters,

And the captain told me how the SS had shot his brothers,

Mother, wife, grandparents and cousins,

Nailing his father to the barn door

And hurling the children into the burning house,

I smelt the blood on Europe’s parapets.[19]

I recalled goats grazing on Punic ruins,[20]

From which even the sea had fled in disgust,

And how Scipio’s Delenda est Carthago![21]

(The victors ploughed up the site with salt)

Was becoming an inspirational slogan

Now wars of liberation were in fashion.

A rabbinical voice warned me Rachel was right;

That the stench of blood would vanquish the fragrant pines,

And the wine-dark, many-voiced, unwearied sea,

Casting on its sands a plethora of corpses,

Was an unwinking, Cyclopean eye,

Watching a game which had nothing to do with Love.

[1] In November 1945, the Arabs rose up against the French colonists who had occupied the country since 1830. The struggle lasted until March 1962, which was fought with the utmost ruthlessness on both sides. Algeria is still torn by civil war.

[2] Spoken by Aeneas, in flight from Troy, to Dido, queen of Carthage, in Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Dreadful, O queen, are the sorrows you order me to renew.’

[3] ‘Everything goes beneath the earth and returns to the game.’

[4] P. Valéry, Le Cimetière Martin. ‘La mer, la mer, toujours recommence.’ The poem is a long, philosophical meditation on death, in a cemetery by the sea.

[5] The German city noted for its annual performance of Wagner’s operas. Wagner, who was intensely anti-Semitic, was adulated by the Nazis.

[6] A local Nazi official.

[7] Henry V, 1.I.ii. 258. The Dauphin’s contemptuous gift of tennis balls provoked Henry into declaring war on France.

[8] Negus, his personal name, means ‘prince’ (Amharic, negus).

[9] ‘Nacht und Nebel’ and ‘Final Solution’ were the Nazi code names for extermination measures taken against the Jews.

[10] A Hebrew prayer for the dead, normally recited by orphan mourners.

[11] The Jews of North Africa were Sephardic.

[12] A French high school maintained by the state.

[13] The French paratroops were notorious for their brutality, as were their opponents.

[14] Title given to the headmaster of a lycee.

[15] Lady Canning said that Lord Byron, who fought with the Greek revolutionaries against the Turks, was ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’.

[16] Le Cimetière Marin, ‘Le larve file ou se formaient les pleurs.’

[17] ‘Hear, O Israel…’ The Jewish prayer stressing exclusive fidelity to God and God’s unity. It is traditionally said to the dying.

[18] See the final section of Ulysees, where Molly Bloom recalls her youthful love-making in Gibraltar.

[19] Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets’

[20] The ruins of Carthaginean cities.

[21] ‘Carthage must be wiped out!’ A slogan voiced by the general who eventually destroyed Carthage, Rome’s greatest rival, in 146 BCE.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

The Wheel

The Wheel

The summer grasses!

All that now remains

Of warriors’ dreams.

(Haiku)

Lifting her bike over a country stile

Into a sea of yellow cowslip waves

One sultry afternoon, truant from class,

They made their bed beneath a flowering hedge.

White hawthorn petals fell on ash blond hair

And strewn garments. Smiling, she idly raised

A slender, naked foot and set the whorl

Beside them spinning like Fortuna’s wheel,

A wanton goddess playing with their lives.

‘Take me before it stops or not at all!’

The restless silence of the summer grass

Engulfed them, as the cuckoo’s deathless cry

Echoed across the valley. Time was not,

Or so they thought, drunk with love’s fantasies.

Their joys were brief; life broke them on its wheel.

Her ashes fed young grasses on that hill.

Fading Beach Snapshot

Fading Beach Snapshot

‘He saw very clearly how all his life had led only to this moment…He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe it would ever leave.’

(Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses)

Beyond attrition, she defies my gaze

This blonde dream-haunter, seen all sleek and new,

Smiling, uncomprehending, at a crab

That threatens her with keen, heraldic claws,

Whole crouching urchins dig with seaside spades.

Full breasts, unhaltered, swell her New Look blouse;

Slim legs raised high, sunning her candid thighs,

This dazzling rider jumps my memory

Across that sultry, summer afternoon.

Approaching thunder! I was digging too,

Crouched in the rain beside a treacherous shore,

Cursing the mortars that had found our range,

My sodden battledress alive with ants,

Helmet bedecked with leaves – the martial look.

She wrote her Dear John on a Sussex beach,

Graceful and violent as a playful cat

Unsheathing claws from silk with lethal ease.

Her lover’s fatal shot struck my head and heart.

This cardboard sea murmurs no requiem

For queens of hearts – now trumped by graveyard spades –

Once blinded by this faithless, summer light.

Destiny overwhelmed her like a storm;

Surer than shellfire, clinging as napalm,

A crueller Crab was waiting down the years

To feed upon her breast, gnaw through her spine.

Smiling, she writes, ruthless, uncomprehending,

Pencilling the letter mouldering in my mind.

Elegy for Thelma Challenor, aged 10.

Elegy for Thelma Challenor, aged 10.

‘Father-like He tends and cares us,

Well our feeble frame He knows.

In His hands He gently bears us,

Rescues us from all our foes.’

(School Hymn)

After the raid, through smoke from burning cities,

Gawking at craters, I crept stunned to school,

Picking up shrapnel from disfigured roads,

Hefting its weight upon a grubby hand.

All night, dark clouds had drizzled jagged steel,

Maniacal lightning blazed from murderous skies,

Thunder had shattered streets of little houses,

Baths, carpets, wardrobes drunkenly entwined.

Our milkman’s horse bristled with crystal daggers,

Skeleton buses mimicked burnt-out tanks.

When solemn schoolmates told me she was dead,

I shrugged and walked away. Boys do not cry.

The desk we’d shared was empty as her satchel;

Her ‘Things to Do’ forgot to mention ‘Dying’.

Her phantom sat beside me all that day,

Thick lashes lowered over haunting eyes,

Turning the pages of her ghostly books;

At times she touched me, copying my maths,

I shivered when brown hair caressed my arm,

Flinched when she brushed my cheek with icy lips.

At four o’clock, watching a convoy anchor,

Steam rising, hissing, from the shattered decks

As hoses washed torn flesh into the scuppers,

I hear her weep, ‘I’m lost! Please take me home!’

At dusk, before crazed sirens howled their song,

I went to call on her, to say goodbye –

Doll’s houses battered by a giant’s hammer,

And broken puppets dragged from rubble heaps;

Some insane ogre in his seven-league boots,

Bellowing for blood, had trampled the street flat.

A doll impaled upon a splintered branch,

Her long plaits tangled in her gaping wound,

She’d looked just so, when I told scary tales,

Biting her thumb, tense with anticipation,

Pulling a strand of hair across her eyes.

I wrenched her loose, fled from the gathering night,

Entombed her in my toy-box, under treasures –

A dud grenade, shrapnel, machine-gun belts,

A bayonet, a live incendiary bomb –

Wrapped her in a shroud of parachute silk,

Muttering a clumsy prayer to a heedless God.

Crouched in a frosty cave, too scared to sleep,

Hearing the drone of killer-bees above

Circling the burning flowers of the towns,

I penned a poem by guttering candlelight,

While slow wax dripped on paper like hot tears,

And the air heaved shuddering sighs with every blast.

Vision

Vision

‘Those who cling to the Void, neglecting Compassion, will not free themselves from the snares of Existence.’

(Saraha)

My antique Roman vase was dropped and shattered.

With patient care, I mended it again,

And yet, for all my pains, it still looks battered,

Emperor and nymph seared by a jagged stain.

Some things are just too fragile to withstand

The clumsy fumbling of a bungling hand.

My ailing lover’s heart was one day broken.

The girl I’d given it to was penitent,

Yet there are words that should not have been spoken,

And letters that should never have been sent.

Most heartfelt love’s too fragile to withstand

Misguided missives from a careless hand.

‘Fate deals a crooked deck.’ This savage age

Had etched that precept deeply in my heart,

Along with: ‘All this world’s a showman’s stage

And we mere puppets, playing practiced parts.’

The upshot being, most of what we say

Is not the truth, but springs from what we play.

So she found nothing untoward in writing

Nine lengthy letters in as many days

To one she had just met. It was exciting

To have him flatter her with unctuous praise,

Till, climaxing,when he declared his need

In doggerel, she paused, then wrote: Agreed!

Was she afraid my love was almost over

And fearful that she could not cope alone,

So sought the shelter of a future lover

Who might well fill my place when I was gone?

A woman needs much more than reassurance

And lovers can be tangible insurance.

Or was she –young and beautiful – just flirting?

He was in love with her, or so she said,

Ashamed yet titillated, she was skirting

A well-worn track that led straight to his bed.

Smiling sardonically, he reeled her in,

While she, half hooked, thought she was netting him.

Not so! The truth, bitter as cyanide,

Was simply that she’d fallen for him – hard!

For he had youth and good looks on his side,

A way with words and women, no holds barred.

A smooth, seductive narcissist whose friends

Could help her to attain her long-sought ends.

For days I waited for her to explain,

But she stayed silent, hidden in her schemes,

While mountebanks in suits, dim-witted, vain,

Posturing windbags plagued my troubled dreams.

Did she possess a secret predilection

For smooth-tongued sleaze- a dubious attraction?

Of course, he never told her he was married;

She took some pains never to mention me.

She knew her youth, her wit and beauty carried

A man away as swiftly as the sea,

And that no vows can stand when fierce ambition

Conspires with lust to storm a frail position.

‘A lot of things look better at a distance,’

McCarthy says, ‘The life you live, for one.’

Was this why she had offered no resistance

To emailed blandishments? New York was fun

While life at home was drab and uninviting

And what potentially was hers, exciting.

Stoically, then, I offered to resign

Since both seemed clearly so intent on mate,

(Ousting a rival king was his design),

But then she wept and claimed malignant Fate

Had led me to read innocence as guilt,

For she loved me, not him. The tears she spilt!

Then I knew she spoke true – not from her crying

For tears are weapons women wield at will,

Nor by her words, for she could well be lying,

An art in which we all acquire some skill,

But rather by a Zen-like flash of insight,

Sheet lightning blazing through black clouds at midnight.

Whole centuries dropped away, burned by that flash.

I watched her weep, ringed by ancestral bones.

Twin lions flanked a tomb. She sifted ash

In brazen urns. Helios! The desert stones

Were bright with blood. Her ritual robe was rent

In mourning: then, where he had gone, she went.

‘The human face?’ said Blake. ‘A furnace sealed.

The human heart? A blacksmith’s glowing fire.’

Such four-fold vision! For her acts revealed

A complex structure – like my funeral pyre,

And yet her remorseful tears fell like rain.

She lit the fire then put it out again.

‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ All!

Eliot had erred; the more we comprehend

The less condemned. Unless we know our fall

Is in itself Illusion, then our end

Brings forth no fruit, like sown seed in sand.

Compassion summarised is: “Understand!’

So how dare I play judge? I should defend

This victim of a nine-to-five affair

Remembering all her lonely, lost weekends,

Those long nights building castles in the air.

I hope her gentle heart will yet forgive

My thoughtless hands, mend me and let me live.

Epilogue:

Primeval Ocean, lord of many voices,

Once angry god, sleeps quietly at our feet.

The winter solstice! Yet my heart rejoices

At what small light remains. Cold waves repeat

Their everlasting OM. As sun slides west

She turns to hold my hand, earth’s fleeting guest,

And watch sea birds sink darkly to their rest.

Easter Rising

Easter Rising

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

That human power cannot remove. (T.S. Eliot)

At dawn on Easter Sunday bells proclaim

That Christ is risen. I have risen too

After a night of fire. Her Grecian name,

Kept ringing like Troy’s tocsin, since I knew,

For all her vows that long affair was over,

She’d spent the night entwined about her lover.

So all that night I’d worn the Nessus shirt

Of love, that clinging burns and burning sears.

I’d never realized how much love could hurt

Till, like a fool, I thought to void the years

That mocked my love and exiled us apart

And let her brand her name upon my heart.

Love is a god that bears no apostates

Who vainly build glass houses on soft sand.

Our separation -ordered by the Fates,

Enforced by Furies- how could we withstand

That dire decree that mocked my mad desire

To stay unharmed while flaming in love’s fire?

‘When my love swears that she is made of truth

I do believe her, though I know she lies.’[1]

Wisdom of age, passion and pride of youth

Contend - and at youth’s feet age bleeding lies.

My own Dark Lady, mistress to another,

Whom, she protests, she loves but as a brother!

Now all have risen: she to his demands

And he to hers, hot in her naked bed,

And I to meet my hangman’s harsh commands

As bound and shackled, to her stake I’m led,

Knowing full well that when we two next meet,

Smiling, she’ll heap more brushwood round my feet.

So Easter Sunday and its empty tomb

Offer no hope to one who loves in vain.

There is no resurrection but the womb

For those who lost yet hope to love again.

While she makes love, swearing she’s his alone,

Chained to her stake, I’m burnt to blackened bone.

[1] Shakespeare, Sonnet 138

Threnody

Threnody

‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, höre mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen?’

(‘So who then, even if I shrieked, would hear me among the angel orders?’)

(R.M Rilke, Duineser Elegien, 1)

‘That which speaks to me about the humane…. are the figures of those who died young and the loving…. Through both these figures the humaneness is blended into my heart, whether I want it or not.’

(R.M. Rilke, Letter to A. Kolb).

‘Ha gente na fica na historia/Da historia a gente’ ‘There are people who remain a part of us/ Becoming part of our own story.’ (Jorge Fernando, Chuva: Fado).

When the World War to end all wars was over 1

And planning for our next war under way,

With other wars, not ours yet, burgeoning

In distant countries bearing half-known names,

Wars laying ambush for us, steel unsprung,

Weary of war and sick of war’s alarms

I sought out solace in less lethal arms.

At eighteen, Eve was also fresh from school,

A Ladies’ College siren, slim and blonde,

High-breasted, swan-necked, rose-lipped, azure-eyed,

Her smile bright as a blade. Though intertwined

Shrouded in darkness in a dream-palace,

(Sole sanctuary for lovers in their teens

When Church and State conspired to keep us pure),

Our thwarted passion left our thirst unslaked

Without the solace of that Grecian Urn[i]

For we were fated both to fade and grieve.

That wintry week, a thoughtful War Office

Had sent a Christmas gift, my call-up card,

(Too young to vote, just old enough to kill).

Long years of separation loomed ahead.

Such severance leaves love bleeding, if not dead.

When king and country call, your number’s up.

The hemlock’s brewed! Drink boldly from the cup!

To tell but the truth,

We lived among losers,

Puritan provincials,

In a land that was lamed ,

Damaged by Depression,

Shabby and scarred,

Tired and tawdry,

Worn out by wars,

Battered by bombing.

Forty years of folly

Had dragged us down

To a ramshackle ruin

Ineptly administered

By arrogant asses,

Braying buffoons,

Oxbridge oafs;

Traitors at the top,

Whores in high places, 40

(Harlots like Hollis,[ii]

Filth like Philby).[iii]

On misshapen monuments

We mourned mass murders,

Flesh of the fallen

Fettered to stone,

Incised in iron,

Name after name,

Squandered and scattered.

Broken the banners

Of ruined regiments

Blazoned battalions,

Decimated divisions.

Were we too destined

To die with devotion,

Unquestioning idiots,

Massacred morons,

Asinine armies

All annihilated?

Schlachtfeld! Battlefield!

Mordesmorde Murder on murder

Blinzeln Blink

Kinderblicke[iv] Children’s sight

For I was set to go and ‘play the game,’ 60

Stiff lipped and nonchalant, the ‘old school’ style,

Befitting scions of a Brigadier,[v]

(Courageous veteran of two world wars,

Still walking stiffly from the wounds he bore),

In hopeless rematch with an ageless ogre

That had devoured grandfathers and fathers,

Killed half our kin, slaughtered wailing children,

Defiled our mourning mothers, weeping wives,

And now was gearing up to do to us

What Minotaur had done to Greek ephebes,

Its expertise perfected by long practice,

Ingeniously improved technology,

Strange artifices meant to expedite

The mathematics of Apocalypse,

Mutual assured destruction by consent

Till, surfeited, earth could not hide the slain.

Times were brutal then, our winter icy,

And hearts grown hardened as the frozen soil;

Since love was rationed tighter than our food

And sex become an obscene, sniggering word, 80

We hungered vainly, dreaming of a life

Less circumscribed by harsh necessity

Than this one where the State’s Medusa glare

Might turn us all to headstones, row on row.

‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’.[vi]

(Horace, Poet Sycophant to emperors,

Stern advocate of soldiers’ funerals

Along with Virgil, sonorous as geese).

I filed my call-up with my Latin verse,

Then crept back to my place in Plato’s Cave.

Since ‘Carpe diem!’ was my watchword then,[vii]

Intent on death, I plucked my roses fast.

For ‘true to one another’ did not mean we’d last.[viii]

‘With luck,’ I’d tell her, ‘We’ve five years to go;

Russian roulette’s a short and lethal game.

When Stalin sows our killing fields we’ll see

Red dragon’s teeth spring up as fighting men[ix],

And then our ignorant armies, East and West,

Locked in blind struggle by this darkling Rhine,[x]

Will join those vanished legions Varus led 100

Through German forests where black trees eat men,

Grim Felsenfeld, where blood drizzled like rain.[xi]

That Christmas Eve a snow storm swooped on us,

Sweeping across our blackened, flint-flaked sea,

Holding us captive in a Coliseum,

Marooned upon a gloomy balcony

In a cavernous, echoing theatre.

Stern Monitors of Law, Furies with torches,

The usherettes retreated to their lair,

Undid their uniforms, let down their hair.

Revelling in this concupiscent carnival,

Glad of this solstitial Saturnalia,

They sprawled sloshed on gin, sedately sodden with scotch,

Under their happily drunken, demobbed boy-friends;

Listened to Vera warbling on white cliffs of Dover,[xii]

Listened to Bing groaning south of the Border,

Swooned at Sinatra crooning to mademoiselle,

Left us alone in a cinema now all ours,

Musical syrup oozing down into their ears.

Then, just as ads were fading from the screen, 120

And darkness drowned our auditorium,

With unseen angels caroling of peace

To shivering sheep and shepherds all unwashed,

Capricious Eve lavished largesse on me,

A gracious gift richer than Orient pearls,

Dazzling as diamond, rarer than radium,

As unexpected as munificent.

As Merteuil shrewdly said of some young girls,

‘Quand elle dit “Je vous aime,” elle se rend’.’[xiii]

(‘For them to say “I love you” is to yield.’)

Disrobing there with daring nonchalance,

She made the balcony our bedchamber,

Removing, with most admirable aplomb,

The Fourteen Obstacles to Fulfillment,

With tantalizing slowness, ordered so:

Her handbag, Paisley headscarf, gloves, fur coat;

White cashmere jumper, silken Dior blouse;

Her camisole and singlet, then her bra;

Her crimson New Look skirt, Parisian style;[xiv]

Flounced petticoat,: scarlet stiletto heels; 140

Sheer nylon stockings, panties (lacy, white),

Draping some carefully over seats like washing,

Folding others neatly, heaped in fragrant arrays,

Leaving her belly girdled with silken suspense,

Her gold watch encircling her fine-boned, slender wrist,

An amethyst necklace adorning her cleavage,

Goya’s La Maja, an odalisque by Ingrès,

A sensual Titian Venus, Tintoretto nude,

Ovid’s Corinna, quam iuvenale femur![xv]

Whiter than snow sieved by this boreal blizzard,

Couched on fur, supine and naked as her namesake

Under white apple blossom, in a bower of bliss.

For three hours, floored, we made undying love,

Inspired by Vatsyayana’s, fleshly sutra,[xvi]

While Ovid and Catullus spurred us on[xvii]

Through colour cartoon, B-movie and main feature,

Entwined on damp fur in that flickering dark,

Under blue, lancing meteorites of light,

The family Bentley’s rug to keep us warm. 160

And school room Latin running through my head:

‘Singula quid referam? Nil non laudabile uidi

Et nudam pressi corpus ad usque meum’[xviii]

Like Ice-age hunters, huddling in a cave

Above a glacis swept by glaciate winds

While the Aurora seared the northern sky,

Urged on by snow queens thronging empty seats

And booming frost giants stalking through the stalls,

We climaxed with theatrical success.

When finally the lights came on again,

As we dressed hurriedly to Save the King!

(Atop his thoroughbred he seemed to say

‘Why does my wife find me a bore in bed?),

I turned to her and asked what we’d not watched

(For watch one should on holy Christmas Eve)

‘It’s a wonderful life,’ she told me softly, [xix]

As Mary might have murmured at the inn,

Watching her baby suckle at her breast,

The Prince of Peace who came with sword in hand

And, conquered, brought the victors to their knees.

Though I agreed, of course, wholeheartedly, 180

I wondered why my query went unheard,

Believing Eve’s Three Faces had been shown[xx]

Not guessing I’d missed Capra’s festive play.

Then hand in hand we braved the falling snow

Enshrouding all my Welsh hills and the Dee,

(Anghofia oll yr addewidion[xxi]

Awnest i rywun, eneth ddell.)

Cloaking the estuary in Druid white,

Shrouding the road once Castra’s legion trod,[xxii]

Valeria Victrix, squandered in Rome’s wars,

The wilderness where Gawain found his knight,

The ’gome in grene’ whose lady sought his head.[xxiii].

Veiling her treachery in courtly jest.

So Keats’ young lovers fled into the storm,[xxiv]

Hearts warmed by pointless pledges, hopeless hopes,

That wilder storms to come would sweep away.

Bleak winter breaks all promises of May.

The windows blank, gate creaking in the wind,

Black gables overgrown with creeping moss,

Her house stood still and empty; she was gone,

Imprisoned in an urn’s cold pastoral.

A colder history within my heart.

Could never tell why it was desolate.[xxv]

Five decades passed, ephemeral as dreams, 200

And youth gave way to age, resignedly.

I watched a smaller screen one Christmas Night

- Crickets in chorus, susurrus of surf -

An envoy from the past, a Yuletide special,

An anguished actor realising the truth,

Thanks to a wandering angel’s guidance,

The world was far the better for his presence,

Though he believed that he had lived in vain.

Let not despair then tempt you to some brink

Hoping the engulfing flood might bring relief,

Though this has been the gift reserved for some

Despairing souls, alone on Christmas Eve,

Seeking for solace in oblivion.

Was this the remedy the poet sought

Upon those cliffs that beetled over the sea

Hard by the castle of the Hohenlohe[xxvi]

And might have found, had not an angel heard,

Though he believed no angel could exist

And that the north wind mocked his puny voice

So even if he did scream none would hear him? 220

‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, höre mich denn aus der Engel

Ordnungen?[xxvii]

Who’d hear indeed? Yet Rilke was mistaken,

For avatars arrive, though unexpected,

Alighting gracefully from gondolas,

Balloons and yachts, cars, buses, limousines,

From helicopters, gliders, private jets,

In somber seasons, robed in elegance,

Seraphim fair as lilies of the field,

In frocks by Valentino or Lauren,

Fashions from Gucci, Galliano, Ford,

Graceful as girls gyrating on catwalks,

Perfumed with Joy, Sex or Jolie Madame,

Bearing handbags by Balenciaga,

And other cultural accoutrements,

Sigils of London, L.A. Paris, Rome,

Ambassadors from angel embassies,

Slimmer than Syrinx, reed that Pan pursued,[xxviii]

With velvet voices, intonations pure,

More musical than fluting Philomel[xxix], 240

Sweet songs to lure us from the burning house

Of samsāra[xxx], children enticed with toys.

These guardian angels know death to the bone

And hence grow heedless of the endless rabble

Of luckless boys, ever borne lifeless home

In wooden dignity from futile battle,

Where ‘With your shield or on it,’ is the word,[xxxi]

And, unlike love, it’s better die than yield,

Since those who live on lies must die by sword

And Death, not Eros, strides the slaughterfield

Strewn once again with those who fought or fled.

Half-dead themselves, gaunt victors burn their dead.

Since love and war can seldom be conjoined,

As Vulcan proved to lovers he entwined,

Star-crossed, in amorous conjunction’s net,[xxxii]

And absence sharks up all our hopeless hopes,

Buoyed up but briefly by propinquity.

And Eve was soon to junk me for a fool,

(I’d known only one of her seven faces,

Which she changed daily, livening up her week)

Then early joined those rose-lipped girls in fields

Where roses fade, as they were born to do, 260

In Earth’s dark monarchy, hungry for flesh,

Insatiable as any Cretan maw,

Then promises seemed puerile, oaths all vain,

Betrayal was the order of the day

And treachery turned commonplace as lies.

So someone’s wife made plaything of a boy

Who quickly proved he only toyed with her,

By leaving her to play with newer toys,

While I was left to face motherless young

Reflecting on how kindly I’d been served[xxxiii]

With troubles, toil and bitter recompense.

Then false friends fled, who ‘some tyme did me seek’,’[xxxiv]

And though an angel stooped to rescue me,

And from my shipwreck bore me safe to shore,

Reviving me with sweet mouth pressed on mine,

Yet still I watched our world lurch towards where

The Damoclean sword hung by a hair.[xxxv]

For World War III kept clawing at our door

A rabid vampire thirsting for fresh blood,

A demented drunk demanding liquor,

A murderous maniac, wild, enraged, 280

A suicide peddling his paranoia

Year after year, psychopathic Santa,

With a sinister sack of nukes, nerve gas,

Pestilence, death and free fall out for all.

So, when I looked around, it sometimes seemed

The world was now that foul and fetid sewer

Where St Teresa saw herself in hell,[xxxvi]

Crouched in a dank cell, amid scuttling claws,

Exiled from light for all eternity.

Those years, I blenched and almost broke at times,

Grown wild with too much thinking on such things,

Recalling Rilke grappling with the gale

That sought to hurl him to the rocks below,

Where the sea crouched, tense, awaiting his fall,

Though not a leaf stirred in the stilly air.

Yet something long forgotten woke in me

In answer to the Master’s masterpiece;

I saw that she had answered my question,

Although unwittingly, that serene seraph

Whose ministrations place her with the loving 300

Though she once ripped a life to shreds with lies,

As smiling girls tear silken wings off flies[xxxvii].

Why from half-buried ruins of the past

Has memory preserved that Christmas Eve,

A patinated bronze urn from a site

Long swallowed up by treacherous, sifting sands?

Why in the telling of this lovers’ tale

Have I suppressed so much that I recall,

Reluctant to expose to hardened eyes

Grown brutal from a surfeit of soft flesh

Our naïve ardours, pristine ecstasies,

Hot tears, confessions, kisses, shudderings,

Our passionate avowals, cries, demands,

Hopes, longings, promises? Let them still rest

Where they belong, deep in the heirless vaults

Of memory, unplundered, unalloyed.

Imagination weaves a tapestry

Shapen from shadows, faded, worn,,

Dimly descried by flickering candlelight, 320

Distorted by the years. In this frail web,

This neural maze of flashing synapses,

Of neurons, dendrites, axons, cunningly

Contrived by māyā, where can truth be found?

These images, blurred slide-shows in my brain

Are they confabulations? Do we live

Amid phantasmagorias? Can we

Ever see things, as old Von Ranke hoped,

’Wie es eigentlich gewesen’? [xxxviii] History

Has cunning corridors. We go astray

And lose ourselves in futile fantasies,

Misapprehensions, dreams, delusions, lies.

And yet we have no other guide than this,

As Dante received Virgil as his guide

(Catullus would have been a subtler choice

And exiled Ovid better than them both)[xxxix]

Who yet was but an insubstantial shade

Though he conducted him through Purgatory,

And led him from the deepest hell to heaven.

Imagination is our Virgil here, 340

A wraith who bids us see where most are blind,

Shaping reality, blazoning the night

With fiery zones then summoning the sun[xl]

To turn the sea to silver, sky to gold,

The clouds to conches trumpeting the winds

To send them voyaging. Shape-shifters all!

Transcending time, we too obey that call.

This story must end as a threnody

For poets know that lovers disappear,

(Crying out: ‘Liebende, seid ihrs dann noch?)[xli]

Leaving only ashes and faded petals

In the rose garden with leaf-clogged fountains,

Where no birds sing, cold breezes blow at nightfall,

And the maze echoes with lost children’s voices,

As the ruined house settles into silence

Among the yew trees shading tumbled graves,

Where crumbling names sink into mossy stone

And time takes back what it so briefly dealt.

Yet though the festering wound she dealt still aches,

Where later she but harmed, she once had healed,

Forging her gift of innocent freshness,

Bestowing a reluctant truth on me: 360

That ‘all shall be well and all shall be well,

All manner of thing shall be well,’ for us,[xlii]

Provided we can learn just to forgive

Our own sick selves as well as those whose blades

Struck home with malice, even as they smiled,

And, faithless, taught us faith can play us false.

As obsequy, I render her grave thanks,

Whose name lives on, etched in my memory,

And shall not be forgotten nor contemned,

Like those dead flowers on that weed-grown mound.

Let her receive this funeral offering

(‘Ce vase pleine de laict,

Ce panier plein de fleurs’)

Who once bore Ronsard’s roses on her cheeks.[xliii]

Blind Orpheus, still losing what he seeks!

These marionettes, dream haunter and betrayed,

Play out their puppet roles with nightly tears,

Till he awakes, rejected by the shade

Of one who has been ashes forty years, 380

To wonder why his old wound bleeds again,.

As dawn creeps blindly up the shadowed wall,

Renewing still that bitter, angry pain,

Forgetting all is Void, illusion. All!

Yet in spite of our tears, our sorrows, loud laments,

Grief born of greed, tears sprung from ignorance,

From lust and violence, hatred, envy, lies,

Malevolence, backbiting, cold betrayals,

Mass lunacies, psychoses run amok,

Slaughters, mutilations, casual cruelties,

Stone-age stupidities, dangerous delusions,

Follies to make that marble angel weep

Who still stands sentry where her ashes rest,

Wings folded, as she folded up her days,

It’s still ‘a wonderful life’; its goodness somehow

‘Blended into my heart,’ whether welcomed or not.

So we endure, stiff figures on a frieze,

Frozen in tortured postures of desire

That trap us ever on a Wheel of fire.

Etched on our inward eye, such memories 400

Insects in honeyed amber, hold us fast,

Reflected in the pearls of Brahma’s Net[xliv],

Infinite jewels, worlds upon worlds! And yet

Shadows ourselves, shadowing that Void,

the past.[xlv]

[i] Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, ’Bold lover never, never canst thou kiss/Though winning near the goal. Yet do not grieve/ She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss/Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.’

[ii] Sir Roger Hollis, one-time Head of MI5, was a KGB agent.

[iii] One of the ‘Cambridge spies’, along with Burgess, McLean and Blunt.

[iv] August Stramm (1874-1915), Schlachtfeld. Stramm, a brilliant poet, was killed in WWI.

[v] The Headmaster of this English public school was a former brigadier, with a distinguished military record.

[vi] ‘It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country’. (Horace, Odes, III,.ii)

[vii] ‘Seize the day!’ (Horace, Odes, I.xi)

[viii] Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach. ‘O love, let us be true to one another…’

[ix] Cadmus killed the dragon that guarded the fountain of Dirce. When he sowed its teeth, they sprang up as armed warriors.

[x] Arnold, Ibid. ‘And we are here as on a darkling plain /Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

[xi] In 9 CE, the XVIIth, XVIIIth and XIXth legions were wiped out at Felsenfeld by the Germans under Arminius.

[xii] Vera Lynn, a popular singer during and after WWII.

[xiii] Slightly adapted from Mme de Merteuil in Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, letter XXXIII.

[xiv] Introduced by Dior shortly after WWII.

[xv] Ovid, Amores, 1.V. ’Such youthful thighs!’

[xvi] The Kama Sutra.

[xvii] Roman poets of love.

[xviii] Ovid, Amores I..V ‘Why catalogue her uniqueness? I saw nothing not worthy of praise and held her naked body close to mine.’

[xix] Referring to Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

[xx] Nunally Johnson’s Academy Award winner, The Three Faces of Eve, featured Joanne Woodward as a woman with three separate personalities who led three separate lives.

[xxi] ‘Forget all the vows you made to someone, sweet girl’. A line from the Welsh song Myfanwy

[xxii] The XXth legion, Valeria Victrix, was stationed at Chester, on the Dee, for some three hundred years.

[xxiii] The medieval poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, places the Green Knight’s castle close to ‘the wilderness of Wirral.’

[xxiv] See Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes, final stanza.

[xxv] Ode on a Grecian Urn, ‘And not a soul to tell/Why thou art desolate shall e’er return.’

[xxvi] Near Trieste, where Rilke began the Duino Elegies.

[xxvii] See Rilke, Duino Elegies 1. (See epigraph to this poem, above)

[xxviii] The nymph, Syrinx, pursued by Pan, was changed into a reed, from which Pan made his pipes.

[xxix] In Greek myth, Philomela, raped by King Tereus, became a nightingale.

[xxx] A Buddhist term meaning ‘the apparently real universe.’

[xxxi] An admonition delivered to sons by their mothers in ancient Sparta.

[xxxii] Mars and Venus making love were trapped by Vulcan in a net.

[xxxiii] Sir Thomas Wyatt, They flee from me… ‘And since that I so kindly am served/ I fain would know what she hath deserved.’

[xxxiv] Sir Thomas Wyatt, ibid.

[xxxv] The sword was suspended over the chair occupied by Damocles at a banquet. A metaphor for impending disaster.

[xxxvi] St Teresa of Avila.

[xxxvii] King Lear, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods/ They kill us for their sport.’

[xxxviii] ‘As it actually happened.’

[xxxix] Since Dante was so in love with Beatrice.

[xl] C.f. Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West.

[xli] Duino Elegies. ‘Lovers, are you still there?’

[xlii] A saying of the fourteenth century mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich

[xliii] ‘This vase filled with milk / This basket filled with flowers.’ (Pierre de Ronsard, 1524-85, ‘Comme on voit sur la branche au mois de Mai la rose’). An elegy for a young girl. (Original orthography).

[xliv] Composed of pearls each reflecting the images of the others. A Buddhist metaphor for the Multiverse.

[xlv] The Void, śunyatā, a Buddhist term for Ultimate Reality.

Monday, May 22 2006

Late Harvest

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