Soldatenfriedhof,
Vladslo.
Grand Crucifixion with Saints,
Convento di San Marco, Florence.
Not the wide sea with its whales, but the poppied
Plain we hardly know is water.
Even the full soil, this firm ground,
Groans to an arch beneath our shoes
Like the face of a pie rising
With all those bodies bundled,
How many per square metre;
Lungs breathing down in the hard, thick earth
That weighs like water round the floating dead.
*
What things can punctuate a soul or sting
The nervous pore, like spirits, more
Than a dimple, uneven moving of the mouth,
The heavy pinkness around your eyes;
The grieving saints
Are not so moving
As you, their drapery never so involving
As that heavy pinkness,
That falling and folding.
*
Will a face float up before me when I am drowning
At last, if fate will have it, and my lungs
Fill up with your so mortal breath;—
Lifting limbs in unrelinquent waves
From the surface, the mirror, landwards;—
Falling back to your more responsive waters,
Drowning shyly, deliberately, being
Drowned at last.
Like a kitten in the sink;
But one whose lives are really nine
And stronger with every expiation. I am
No quietist, want to enjoy,
To see from every angle, taste
The salt, show each snare
The hardness of irony,
The softness of compliance;
But no precautious piety, no waste.
*
I am still afraid
For in that faceless golden head
I see no eyes.
Her blonde hair, her back to me,
The face I cannot see, pressed
Hard against another breast.
The blackness she sees
Is not the blankness I see
In that faceless golden head.
*
What if the ground simmers up around our legs—
Will it take us in, the dead slide round about us
Again? the ones with bullets in their backs;
The ones who wandered down there by mistake,
Making a cup of tea;
Or those who had to use the forbidden key?
And will they be just like their photographs?
Their faces will be closed against the waters.
And even supposing the water should come to be
Fresh and cool and clear, seem sweet to savour,
Still as I bend to drink, I shall only see better
The crayfish scuttling in the rocks, and lobsters
Trailing strands of your hair in their grey hands,
Their colder-blooded, colder-blooded claws.