These Consolations
I SHALL console myself by being absurd
And sit among the rank, unwholesome dews,
And watch each whining pheasant and each bird
Guzzle the very-human bearded grain:
I shall not weep beneath the dismal yews
But to the milk-white turtles tune my pain.
Where spiny pines diffuse a noxious shade
I’ll wage a series of intestine wars,
The listening wolves grow milder in the glade
Beneath the incense of the breathing Spring,
Whilst every shepherd polishes his sores
I’ll languish into life, and living, sing.
The women teem their babes; the sative plants
Quiver as Cynthia fills her silver horn,
The spicy forest and her sycophants,
The fiery-pointed organons of sense,
Attempt to catch the sound as it is born
And, as it dies, the hush is thick and tense.
But even so the tensity can vex
What I had hoped had blackened into jet,
Like raven-feathers in the moon’s reflex,
The feeble eyes of our aspiring thoughts,
But even so the tensity can fret,
And I must grope in unsuspected orts....
I shall console myself with being fed
On hollow sapless tales and other slips,
And to the pallid nations of the dead
I’ll wander, and as soon as I arise
A liquid film will glaze upon my lips,
Upon my pores, impatient for the skies.
In the Month of Athyr[B]
THESE ruins seem a womb of cringing air,
So thin that the ears tingle, flickering,
And every barren plant is withering,
Ready to snap, like glass, for sheer despair ...
And through the ether mountains loom like bones
So hollow you could scrape a melody
Sounding like water from them, oozily
To this sun-stricken desert-world of groans.
The light is cruel: it is hard to read
The letters on these stones, but, lo, the words:
“Lord Jesus Christ” and further “soul”; what birds
Erased the script with droppings? and what weed
Has wrested from these crevices a home?
“In month of Athyr” ... “Lucius fell asleep”....
His age is mentioned: he was young; and deep
Beneath the damaged parts, as in a foam
Of centuries I see, disfigured, “tears.”
Then “tears” again, “for us his friends who weep”....
Lucius was much belovèd, it appears.
In grey November ... Lucius fell asleep....
[B] The ancient Egyptian November (derived from a poem by C. P. Cavafy).
Discoveries
WE have discovered many things
To suit our moods, to give us wings:
More than an Aristotle-tome
In crimson splash of a fowl’s comb,
In silver-boled unleaving trees
Like organ-pipes along the breeze;
Sometimes the notes run sharp and false
When rooks and twigs join in the valse
Of smooth and swaying treetop spun
Like yarn across the copper sun....
But there are times when you would cry
To hear the trees’ low melody.
And we have watched the hemlock spray
And smelt dank wafture of decay,
The fume from tawny bellied leaves
In spirals where the autumn grieves.
With froth of flowers we have been rich—
The globuled frog-spawn on the ditch
Was mottled with our wonder; vast
Moist moans of raping bees’ repast
Have sluiced our languid afternoons
Like ripples crawling on lagoons.
But we have not discovered yet
How to erase, how to forget
Sheer vividness of solitude,
How to obliterate each mood
To dim Antarctic memories,
Merged icebergs twinkling in chopped seas.