Most of all I wanted to see your eyes

                           Yannis Keats

                                   +--------`               by Angelos Sikelianos

A branch, the hand of Apollo,

The plane tree’s polished, broad bough,
Spread above you, may it bring you
The universe’s immortal peace.

You'd meet me on the broad and shining shore

            Of Pylos, so I'd planned,

With Mentor's tall ship pulled up on the beach

          Snug in the sand.

We would be bound, as those who sailed with the gods,

         In the winged friendship of youth,

And would take our seats in the stone thrones that Time

         And custom had made smooth

And meet that man who still in the third generation

        Reigned serene, a sage

Whose tales of travels and holy decrees had ripened

        In his mind with age --

At dawn we'd attend the sacrifice to the gods,
        The ritual slaughterers
Of the three-year old heifers, and hear the single cry
        That rose from his three daughters.

When the axe thwacked, and the black-fringed, slow-rolling eye

        Drowned in a swoon

Of darkness, and the gilt horns were rendered idle,

      A hazy half moon.

My love imagined you, as a sister her brother

      In your virginal bath,

How Polycaste rinsed your naked body and dressed you

      In a robe of fine cloth.

I thought to prod you a little with my foot

      As dawn was about to break:

The gleaming chariot's yoked for us and ready.

     No time to lose! Awake!

And to spend all day in the talk that comes and goes,

     Or silence, when no one spoke,

While we drove the horses who were always leaning one way

     Or another against the yoke,

But most of all I wanted to see your eyes,

     Your deer-like eyes, behold

The palace of Menelaus, and forget themselves

     In bronze and the gleam of gold.

Unwavering gaze, sinking the sight so deep,

     You'd never remember

The figured silver, the ivory, gilded or whte,

    The heavy amber,

And I thought that I would say in a hushed voice

    Leaning close to your ear,

Watch out, my friend, because in a moment, soon,

    Helen will appear

Before our very eyes, the one and only

    Daughter of the Swan,

And then we will sink our eyelids in the river

    Of Oblivion.

                              ●

So brightly I saw you; but what grassy roads

     Have led me to your tomb!

And the blazing roses with which I strew your grave

    And make all Rome abloom,

Light the way unto your golden songs

    As though they were the brave,

Armed bodies that turn to dust before one's eyes

    In an ancient, new-breached grave,

And all the worth treasure of Mycenae

    The golden plunder

I thought to lay before you -- goblet, sword,

    And diadem -- past wonder,

A mask on your dead beauty like the mask

    That covered the face

Of the king of the Achaeans,

    Hammered upon Death's trace.

Trans. A. E. Stallings 

The great door in the air

by Ted Hughes    

            Opus 131        

Opus 131 in C sharp minor

Opened the great door

In the air, and through it

Flooded horror. The door in the hotel room

And the curtain at the window and even

The plain homely daylight blocking the window

Were in the wrong dimension

To shut it out. The counterpoint pinned back

The flaps of the body. Naked, faceless,

The heart panted there, lie a fetus.

Where was the lifeline music? What had happened

To consolation, prayer, transcendence --

To the selective disconnecting

Of the pain center? Dark insects

Fought with their instruments

Scampering through your open body

As if you had already left it. Beethoven

Had broken down. You strained, listening

Maybe for divorce to be resolved

In the arithmetic of vibration

To pure zero, for the wave-particles

To pronounce on the unimportance

Of the menopause. Beethoven

Was trying to repair

The huge constellations of his silence

That flickered and glinted in the wind.

But the notes, with their sharp vaces,

Were already carrying you off,

Each with a different bit, into the corners

Of the universe.

River

Fallen from heaven, lies across

The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on

Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness

Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried

Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils.

It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit

It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world

So the river is a god

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,

Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.

Immortal.  And will wash itself of all deaths.

From River: New Poems, 1983.

The first to say star, water, stone

The Makers

                          by Howard Nemerov

Who can remember back to the first poets,

The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back

Or now considers, among the artifacts,

And bones and cantilevered inference

The past is made of, those first and gretest poets,

So lofty and disdainful of renown

They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue

Worded the world, that were the first to say

Star, water, stone, that said the visible

And made it bring invisbles to view

In wind and time and change, and in the mind

Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world

And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers

Of the city into the astonished sky.

The were the first great listeners, attuned

To interval, relationship, and scale,

The first to say above, beneath, beyond,

Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,

Who having uttered vanished from the world

Leaving no memory but the marvelous

Magical elements, the breathing shapes

And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

The lunatic fringe

The Lunatic Fringe

                       by Christine Brooke-Rose 

 

Have you ever felt madness behind your eyes
cold as a draught from a forgotten door,
when you are talking intelligently to those
who think you sane, poised and perhaps a little more
brilliant than that flask of liquid brain allows,
that honeycomb filled with the drugs of bees
out of a season’s hearts, then drained
by the insomniac insolent machinery of love?

Madness, like shame or rage, is not hot as they say,
but like a stylus needling in a groove
to some loudspeaker at a distance of
about God’s nearness to us,
which for the lunatic is close
as his own brain that sometimes runs away
into an ocean of prehistoric fish,
long-playing to the beak of a bird,
and amplified
in, maybe, sex.

I must get into the mad world now.
There is a secret in the lunatic fringe,
a way of impinging
on God without mock-heroics of spirit.
When the soul is anyway lost,
given up with awareness,
generously as a gambit
in life’s deadly conversation with death,
there then can be no remorse,
only the cold closeness of creation,
a white filament of matter through the brain
ejaculating from generation to generation,
like Lucifer, falling.

 

 (1956) 

From TLS 13 April 2013.