Free Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell Page A

throat.
    Once too meeting by the Seine
    The waters a moving floor of stars,
    He had vanished when I reached the door,
    But there on the pavement burning
    Lay one of his familiar black cigars.
    The meeting on the dark stairway
    Where the tide ran clean as a loom:
    The betrayal of her, her kisses
    He has witnessed them all: often
    I hear him laughing in the other room.
    He watches me now, working late,
    Bringing a poem to life, his eyes
    Reflect the malady of De Nerval:
    O useless in this old house to question
    The mirrors, his impenetrable disguise.
    1943/ 1942

CONON IN EXILE
    Author’s Note
    Conon is an imaginary Greek philosopher who visited me twice in my dreams, and with whom I occasionally identify myself; he is one of my masks, Melissa is another; I want my total poetic work to add up as a kind of tapestry of people, some real, some imaginary. Conon is real.
    I
    Three women have slept with my books,
    Penelope among admirers of the ballads,
    Let down her hair over my exercises
    But was hardly aware of me; an author
    Of tunes which made men like performing dogs;
    She did not die but left me for a singer in a wig.
II
    Later Ariadne read of The Universe,
    Made a journey under the islands from her own
    Green home, husband, house with olive trees.
    She lay with my words and let me breathe
    Upon her face; later fell like a gull from the
    Great ledge in Scio. Relations touched her body
    Warm and rosy from the oil like a scented loaf,
    Not human any more—but not divine as they had hoped.
III
    You who pass the islands will perhaps remember
    The lovely Ion, harmless, patient and in love.
    Our quarrels disturbed the swallows in the eaves,
    The wild bees could not work in the vine;
    Shaken and ill, one of true love’s experiments,
    It was she who lay in the stone bath dry-eyed,
    Having the impression that her body had become
    A huge tear about to drop from the eye of the world.
    We never learned that marriage is a kind of architecture,
    The nursery virtues were missing, all of them,
    So nobody could tell us why we suffered.
IV
    It would be untrue to say that The Art of Marriage
    And the others: Of Peace in the Self and Of Love
    Brought me no women; I remember bodies, arms, faces,
    But I have forgotten their names.
V
    Finally I am here. Conon in exile on Andros
    Like a spider in a bottle writing the immortal
    Of Love and Death, through the bodies of those
    Who slept with my words but did not know me.
    An old man with a skinful of wine
    Living from pillow to poke under a vine.
    At night the sea roars under the cliffs.
    The past harms no one who lies close to the Gods.
    Even in these notes upon myself I see
    I have put down women’s names like some
    Philosophical proposition. At last I understand
    They were only forms for my own ideas,
    With names and mouths and different voices.
    In them I lay with myself, my style of life,
    Knowing only coitus with the shadows,
    By our blue Aegean which forever
    Washes and pardons and brings us home.
    1943/ 1 942

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 the 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