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

long oars.
    The Ocean’s peculiar spelling
    Haunts here, cuddled by syllables
    In caves perpendicular, a blue recitation
    Of water washing the dead,
    On the pediments of the statues,
    Came the strange man, the solitary man,
    Fangbrand the unsuspecting,
    Missionary one in thick soles,
    Measuring penance by the pipkin,
    Step-brother to the gannet,
    Travelling the blue bowl of the world,
    His virtues in him rough as towels.
    His brows that bent like forests
    Over the crystal-gazing eyes;
    His brows that bent like forests,
    A silver hair played on his neck.
    He saw this rock and the seal asleep,
    With the same mineral stare.
    This place he made pastance
    For the platonic ass; in this
    Cottage by the water supported
    The duellers, the twins,
    Of argument and confusion,
    Alone in a melancholy hat.
    Those who come to this pass,
    Ask themselves always how
    A rock can become a parish,
    Pulpits whitened by the sea-birds,
    Mean more than just house, rock,
    A tree, a table and a chair.
    His window was Orion;
    At night standing upon the deep,
    His eyes smaller than commas
    Watched without regret the ships
    Passing, one light in a void,
    One pure point on the wave’s floor.
    Measured in the heart’s small flask
    The spirit’s disturbance: the one voice
    Saying ‘Renounce’, the other
    Answering ‘Be’; the division
    Of the darkness into faces
    Crying ‘Too late’ ‘Too late’.
    At night the immediate
    Rubbing of the ocean on stones,
    The headlands dim in her smoke
    And always the awareness
    Of self like a point, the quiver
    As of a foetal heart asleep in him.
    Continuous memory, continual evocations.
    An old man in a colony of stones,
    Frowning, exilic, upon a thorn,
    Learning nothing of time:
    Sometimes in a windy night asleep
    His lips brushed the forbidden apples.
    Everything reproached him, the cypress
    Revising her reflection in pools,
    The olive’s stubborn silver in wind,
    The nude and statuary hills all
    Saying ‘Turn back. Turn back.
    Peace lies another way, old man’.
    It seemed to him here at last
    His age, his time, his sex even
    Were struck and past; life
    In a flood carrying all idols
    Into the darkness, struck
    Like floating tubs, and were gone.
    The pathfinder rested now,
    The sick man found silence
    Like the curved ear of a shell;
    A roar of silence even
    Diminishing the foolish cool
    Haunting note of the dove.
    By day he broke his fruit
    Humbly from the tree: his water
    From wells as deep as Truth:
    Living on snails and waterberries,
    Marvelling for the first time
    At the luminous island, the light.
    His body he left in pools
    Now dazed by fortune, like an old
    White cloth discarded where
    Only the fish were visitors.
    Their soft perverted kisses
    Melted the water on his side.
    The rich shadow of the vine’s tent
    Like a cold cloth on his skull;
    Spring water blown through sand,
    Bubbled on mineral floors,
    Ripened in smooth cisterns
    Dripped from a hairy lintel on his tongue.
    Truth’s metaphor is the needle,
    The magnetic north of purpose
    Striving against the true north
    Of self: Fangbrand found it out,
    The final dualism in very self,
    An old man holding an asphodel.
    Everywhere night lay spilled,
    Like coolness from spoons,
    And his to drink, the human
    Surface of the sky, the planes
    And concaves of the eye reflecting
    A travelling mirror, the earth.
    He regarded himself in water,
    The torrid brow’s beetle,
    The grammarian’s cranium-bone.
    He regarded himself in water
    Saying ‘X marks the spot,
    Self, you are still alive!’
    From now the famous ten-year
    Silence fell on him; disciples
    Invented the legend; now
    They search the white island
    For a book perhaps, a small
    Paper of revelation left behind.
    Comb out the populous waters,
    Study the mud: what kept,
    Held, fed, fattened him?
    The hefts of stone are the only
    Blossoms here: nothing grows,
    But the ocean expunges.
    Time’s chemicals mock the hunter
    For crumbs of