A Milonga for Manuel Flores
Manuel Flores is going to die,
That’s ‘on the money’;
Dying is a habit
That’s well-known to many.
Even so it grieves me
To say adiós to being,
That thing so familiar,
So sweet and enduring.
At dawn I gaze at my hands,
In my hands the veins there;
I gaze but don’t understand
It’s as if they were strangers.
Tomorrow four bullets will come
And oblivion with those four;
Thus said the wise Merlin:
To die is to have been born.
So many things on the road
These two eyes have seen!
When Christ has judged me
Who knows what they’ll see.
Manuel Flores is going to die,
That’s ‘on the money’;
Dying is a habit
That’s well-known to many.
New England 1967
The forms in my dreams have changed;
now there are red houses side by side
and the delicate bronze of the leaves
and chaste winter and pious wood.
As on the seventh day, the world
is good. In the twilight there persists
what’s almost non-existent, bold, sad,
an ancient murmur of Bibles, war.
Soon (they say) the first snow will fall
but I feel in the decline of evening
today so long, and yesterday so brief.
your streets, without time or reason.
The Suicide
Not a star will remain in the night.
The night itself will not remain.
I will die and with me the sum
Of the intolerable universe.
I’ll erase the pyramids, the coins,
The continents and all the faces.
I’ll erase the accumulated past.
I’ll make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I gaze at the last sunset.
I am listening to the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no-one.
Things
My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,
The docile lock and the belated
Notes my few days left will grant
No time to read, the cards, the table,
A book, in its pages, that pressed
Violet, the leavings of an afternoon
Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,
The reddened mirror facing to the west
Where burns illusory dawn. Many things,
Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,
Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,
So blind and so mysteriously secret!
They’ll long outlast our oblivion;
And never know that we are gone.
To the Nightingale
On what secret night in England
Or by the incalculable constant Rhine ,
Lost among all the nights of my nights,
Carried to my unknowing ear
Your voice, burdened with mythology,
Nightingale of Virgil, of the Persians?
Perhaps I never heard you, yet my life
I bound to your life, inseparably.
A wandering spirit is your symbol
In a book of enigmas. El Marino
Named you the siren of the woods
And you sing through Juliet’s night
And in the intricate Latin pages
And from the pine-trees of that other,
Nightingale of Germany Judea ,
Heine, mocking, burning, mourning.
Keats heard you for all, everywhere.
There’s not one of the bright names
The people of the earth have given you
That does not yearn to match your music,
Nightingale of shadows. The Muslim
Dreamed you drunk with ecstasy
His breast trans-pierced by the thorn
Of the sung rose that you redden
With your last blood. Assiduously
I plot these lines in twilight emptiness,
Nightingale of the shores and seas,
Who in exaltation, memory and fable
Burn with love and die melodiously.
The Moon
There is such solitude in that gold.
The moon of these nights is not the moon
The first Adam saw. Long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her with
An old lament. See. She is your mirror.
Remorse
I have committed the worst of sins
One can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Take and engulf me, mercilessly.
My parents bore me for the risky
And the beautiful game of life,
For earth, water, air and fire.
I failed them, I was not happy.
Their youthful hope for me unfulfilled.
I applied my mind to the symmetric
Arguments of art, its web of trivia.
They willed me bravery. I was not brave.
It never leaves me. Always at my side,
That shadow of a melancholy man.
Alhambra
Welcome, the water’s voice
To one whom black sand overwhelmed,
Welcome, to the curved hand
The smooth column of the marble,
Welcome, slender labyrinths of water
Between the lemon trees,
Welcome the melodious zéjel,
Welcome is love, welcome the prayer
Offered to a God who is One,
Welcome the jasmine.
Vain the scimitar
Against the long lances of the host,
Vain to be the best.
Good to know, foreknow, grieving king,
That your courtesies are farewells,
That the key will be denied you,
The infidels’ cross eclipse the moon,
The afternoon you gaze on prove your last.
Things That Might Have Been
I think of things that weren’t, but might have been.
The treatise on Saxon myths Bede never wrote.
The inconceivable work Dante might have had a glimpse of,
As soon as he’d corrected the Comedy’s last verse.
History without the afternoons of the Cross and the hemlock.
History without the face of Helen.
Man without the eyes that gave us the moon.
On Gettysburg
The love we never shared.
The wide empire the Vikings chose not to found.
The world without the wheel or the rose.
The view John Donne held of Shakespeare.
The other horn of the Unicorn.
The fabled Irish bird that lights on two trees at once.
The child I never had.
Inferno V:129
They let fall the book, when they see
that they are the ones in the book.
(They will be in another, greater,
but what can that matter to them.)
Now they are Paolo, Francesca,
not two friends who are sharing
the savour of a fable.
They gaze with incredulous wonder.
Their hands do not touch.
They’ve discovered the sole treasure;
They have found one another.
They betray no Malatesta,
since betrayal requires a third
and they are the only two on earth.
They are Paolo and Francesca
and the queen and her lover too
and all the lovers who’ve been
since Adam went with Eve
in the Paradise garden.
A book, a dream reveals
that they are forms in a dream once
dreamt in Brittany
Another book will ensure that men,
dreams also, dream of them.
The Just
A man who, as Voltaire wished, cultivates his garden.
He who is grateful that music exists on earth.
He who discovers an etymology with pleasure.
A pair in a Southern café, enjoying a silent game of chess.
The potter meditating on colour and form.
The typographer who set this, though perhaps not pleased.
A man and a woman reading the last triplets of a certain canto.
He who is stroking a sleeping creature.
He who justifies, or seeks to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for Stevenson’s existence.
He who prefers the others to be right.
These people, without knowing, are saving the world.
Shinto
When misfortune confounds us
in an instant we are saved
by the humblest actions
of memory or attention:
the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of November,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain.
Eight million the deities of Shinto
who travel the earth, secretly.
Those modest divinities touch us,
touch us, and pass on by.
The Sum
The silent friendliness of the moon
(misquoting Virgil) accompanies you
since that one night or evening lost
in time now, on which your restless
eyes first deciphered her forever
in a garden or patio turned to dust.
Forever? I know someone, someday
will be able to tell you truthfully:
‘You’ll never see the bright moon again,
You’ve now achieved the unalterable
sum of moments granted you by fate.
Useless to open every window
in the world. Too late. You’ll not find her.’
We live discovering and forgetting
that sweet familiarity of the night.
Take a long look. It might be the last.
Elegy for a Park
The labyrinth is lost. Lost too
all those lines of eucalyptus,
the summer awnings and the vigil
of the incessant mirror, repeating
the expression of every human face,
everything fleeting. The stopped
clock, the tangled honeysuckle,
the arbour, the frivolous statues,
the other side of evening, the trills,
the mirador and the idle fountain
are things of the past. Of the past?
If there’s no beginning, no ending,
and if what awaits us is an endless
sum of white days and black nights,
we are already the past we become.
We are time, the indivisible river,
are Uxmal Carthage
walls of the Romans and the lost
park that these lines commemorate
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