(For Maurice and Gwen Mandelbaum)
Dear, all benevolence of fingering lips
That does not ask forgiveness is a noise
At drunken feasts where
Sorrow strips
To serve some glittering generalities:
Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear
The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year
And all our senses roaring as the
Black Dog leaps upon the individual back.
Whose sable genius understands too well
What code of famine can administrate
Those inarticulate wastes where dwell
Our howling appetites: dear heart, do not
Think lightly to contrive his overthrow;
O promise nothing, nothing, till you know
The kingdom offered by the love-lorn eyes
A land of condors, sick cattle, and dead flies.
And how contagious is its desolation,
What figures of destruction unawares
Jump out on Lovers imagination
And chase away the castles and the bears;
How warped the mirrors where our worlds are made;
What armies burn up honour, and degrade
Our will-to-order into thermal waste;
How much lies smashed that cannot be replaced.
O let none say I Love until aware
What huge resources it will take to nurse
One ruining speck, one tiny hair
That casts a shadow through the universe :
We are the deaf immured within a loud
And foreign language of revolt, a crowd
Of poaching hands and mouths who out of fear
Have learned a safer life than we can bear.
Nature by nature in unnature ends:
Echoing each other like two waterfalls,
Tristan, Isolde, the great friends.
Make passion out of passion s obstacles;
Deliciously postponing their delight.
Prolong frustration till it lasts all night,
Then perish lest Brangaene s worldly cry
Should sober their cerebral ecstasy.
But, dying, conjure up their opposite,
Don Juan, so terrified of death he hears
Each moment recommending it,
And knows no argument to counter theirs;
Trapped in their vile affections, he must find
Angels to keep him chaste; a helpless, blind.
Unhappy spook, he haunts the urinals.
Existing solely by their miracles.
That syllogistic nightmare must reject
The disobedient phallus for the sword;
The lovers of themselves collect.
And Eros is politically adored:
New Machiavellis flying through the air
Express a metaphysical despair.
Murder their last voluptuous sensation,
All passion in one passionate negation.
Beloved, we are always in the wrong.
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day.
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command — Rejoice.
Rejoice, What talent for the makeshift thought
A living corpus out of odds and ends?
What pedagogic patience taught
Pre-occupied and savage elements
To dance into a segregated charm?
Who showed the whirlwind how to he an arm.
And gardened from the wilderness of space
The sensual properties of one dear face?
Rejoice, dear love, in Love s peremptory word;
All chance, all love, all logic, you and I,
Exist by grace of the Absurd,
And without conscious artifice we die:
O, lest we manufacture in our flesh
The lie of our divinity afresh,
Describe round our chaotic malice now.
The arbitrary circle of a vow.
The scarves, consoles, and fauteuils of the mind
May be composed into a picture still,
The matter of corrupt mankind
Resistant to the dream that makes it ill.
Not by our choice but our consent: beloved, pray
That Love, to Whom necessity is play.
Do what we must yet cannot do alone
And lay your solitude beside my own.
That reason may not force us to commit
That sin of the high-minded, sublimation,
Which damns the soul by praising it.
Force our desire, O Essence of creation.
To seek Thee always in Thy substances.
Till the performance of those offices
Our bodies. Thine opaque enigmas, do.
Configure Thy transparent justice too.
Lest animal bias should decline our wish
For Thy perfection to identify
Thee with Thy things, to worship fish.
Or solid apples, or the wavering sky.
Our intellectual motions with Thy light
To such intense vibration. Love, excite.
That we give forth a quiet none can tell
From that in which the lichens live so well.
That this round O of faithfulness we swear
May never wither to an empty nought
Nor petrify into a square,
Mere habits of affection freeze our thought
In their inert society, lest we
Mock virtue with its pious parody
And take our love for granted, Love, permit
Temptations always to endanger it.
Lest, blurring with old moonlight of romance
The landscape of our blemishes, we try
To set up shop on Goodwin Sands,
That we, though lovers, may love soberly,
O Fate, O Felix Osculum, to us Remain nocturnal and mysterious:
Preserve us from presumption and delay;
O hold us to the voluntary way.