Collected Poems

ALL THE BEAUTIFUL ARE BLAMELESS

After the lifeguard rose up from the waves Like a sea-lizard with the scales washed off? Sit there, admiring sunlight on a shell? Abstract with terror of the shell, I stared Over the waters where God brooded for the living all one day. Lonely for weeping, starved for a sound of mourning, I bowed my head, and heard the sea far off Washing its hands. ALL THE BEAUTIFUL ARE BLAMELESS Out of a dark into the dark she leaped Lightly this day. Heavy with prey, the evening skiffs are gone, And drowsy divers lift their helmets off, Dry on the shore. Two stupid harly-charlies got her drunk And took her swimming naked on the lake. The waters rippled lute-like round the boat, And far beyond them, dipping up and down, Unmythological sylphs, their names unknown, Beckoned to sandbars where the evenings fall. Only another drunk would say she heard A natural voice Luring the flesh across the water. I think of those unmythological Sylphs of the trees. Slight but orplidean shoulders weave in dusk Before my eyes when I walk lonely forward To kick beer-cans from tracked declivities. If I, being lightly sane, may carve a mouth Out of the air to kiss, the drowned girl surely Listened to lute-song where the sylphs are gone. The living and the dead glide hand in hand SAINT JUDAS 63 Under cool waters where the days are gone. Out of the dark into a dark I stand. The ugly curse the world and pin my arms Down by their grinning teeth, sneering a blame. Closing my eyes, I look for hungry swans To plunder the lake and bear the girl away, Back to the larger waters where the sea Sifts, judges, gathers the body, and subsides. But here the starved, touristic crowd divides And offers the dead Hell for the living body's evil: The girl flopped in the water like a pig And drowned dead drunk. So do the pure defend themselves. But she, Risen to kiss the sky, her limbs still whole, Rides on the dark tarpaulin toward the shore; And the hired saviours turn their painted shell Along the wharf, to list her human name. But the dead have no names, they lie so still, And all the beautiful are blameless now. IN A VIENNESE CEMETERY There Hugo Wolf is buried: tully formed Out of the stone a naked woman leans Kissing the uncut stone, the solid void Of granite cold to sound and song unmade. She holds her body to the rock, unwarmed By any sculptor's trick. The climbing vines Fail to relieve what barren death destroyed: The life half over, and the song gone dead. Somewhere unborn inside the stone a mouth Hungered severely for her starving kiss. Reaching his lover's hands across the dark, 64 ...