Free Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell

bird’s beak poking out of the flesh,
    A bird’s beak singing between the eyes.
    â€˜The earth is a loaf,
    Image, Image, Image,
    The wet part is joined to the dry,
    Like the joints of Adam.’
    It is dark now. Rise.
    Between the Nonself and the Self
    Cover the little wound
    With soft red clay,
    From the hit of the wind of Death,
    From the chink of the pin of Day.
    The heart’s cold singing part,
    Image of the Dancer in water,
    Close up with the soft red clay
    The wound in the mystical bud:
    For the dancers walking in the water
    This is the body, this the blood.
    1946/ 1942

TO PING-KÛ, ASLEEP
    You sleeping child asleep, away
    Between the confusing world of forms,
    The lamplight and the day; you lie
    And the pause flows through you like glass,
    Asleep in the body of the nautilus.
    Between comparison and sleep,
    Lips that move in quotation;
    The turning of a small blind mind
    Like a plant everywhere ascending.
    Now our love has become a beanstalk.
    Invent a language where the terms
    Are smiles; someone in the house now
    Only understands warmth and cherish,
    Still twig-bound, learning to fly.
    This hand exploring the world makes
    The diver’s deep-sea fingers on the sills
    Of underwater windows; all the wrecks
    Of our world where the sad blood leads back
    Through memory and sense like divers working.
    Sleep, my dear, we won’t disturb
    You, lying in the zones of sleep.
    The four walls symbolise love put about
    To hold in silence which so soon brims
    Over into sadness: it’s still dark.
    Sleep and rise a lady with a flower
    Between your teeth and a cypress
    Between your thighs: surely you won’t ever
    Be puzzled by a poem or disturbed by a poem
    Made like fire by the rubbing of two sticks?
    1943/ 1 942

TO ARGOS
    The roads lead southward, blue
    Along a circumference of snow,
    Identified now by the scholars
    As a home for the cyclops, a habitation
    For nymphs and ancient appearances.
    Only the shepherd in his cowl
    Who walks upon them really knows
    The natural history in a sacred place;
    Takes like a text of stone
    A familiar cloud-shape or fortress,
    Pointing at what is mutually seen,
    His dark eyes wearing the crowsfoot.
    Our idols have been betrayed
    Not by the measurement of the dead ones
    Who are lying under these mountains,
    As under England our own fastidious
    Heroes lie awake but do not judge.
    Winter rubs at the ice like a hair,
    Dividing time; and a single tree
    Reflects here a mythical river.
    Water limps on ice, or scribbles
    On doors of sand its syllables,
    All alone, in an empty land, alone.
    This is what breaks the heart.
    We say that the blood of Virgil
    Grew again in the scarlet pompion,
    Ever afterwards reserving the old poet
    Memorials in his air, his water: so
    In this land one encounters always
    Agamemnon, Agamemnon; the voice
    Of water falling on hair in caves,
    The stonebreaker’s hammer on walls,
    A name held closer in the circles
    Of bald granite than even these cyclamen,
    Like children’s ears attentive here,
    Blown like glass from the floors of snow.
    Truly, we the endowed who pass here
    With the assurance of visitors in rugs
    Can raise from the menhir no ghost
    By the cold sound of English idioms.
    Our true parenthood rests with the eagle,
    We recognize him turning over his vaults.
    Bones have no mouths to smile with
    From the beds of companionable rivers dry.
    The modern girls pose on a tomb smiling;
    Night watches us on the western horn;
    The hyssop and the vinegar have lost their meaning,
    And this is what breaks the heart.
    1943/ 1942

‘Je est un Autre’
    RIMBAUD                
    He is the man who makes notes,
    The observer in the tall black hat,
    Face hidden in the brim:
    In three European cities
    He has watched me watching him.
    The street-corner in Buda and after
    By the post-office a glimpse
    Of the disappearing tails of his coat,
    Gave the same illumination, spied upon,
    The tightness in the