Bride of Ice Read online

  For tomorrow! Not yet! Above our foreheads

  will break – death’s sea of – memories!

  For tomorrow, when we shall realise!

  That sound what? as if someone were

  crying just nearby? Can that be it?

  The mountain is mourning. Because we must go down

  separately, over such mud,

  into life which we all know is nothing but

  mob market barracks:

  That sound said: all poems of

  mountains are written thus

  8

  Hump of Atlas, groaning

  Titan, this town where we

  live, day in, day out, will come

  to take a pride in the mountain

  where we defeated life – at cards, and

  insisted with passion not to

  exist. Like a bear-pit.

  And the twelve apostles.

  Pay homage to my dark cave,

  (I was a cave that the waves entered).

  The last hand of the card game was

  played, you remember, at the edge of the suburb?

  Mountain many worlds the

  gods take revenge on their own likeness!

  And my grief began with this mountain

  which sits above me now like my headstone.

  9

  Years will pass. And then the inscribed

  slab will be changed for tombstone and removed.

  There will be summerhouses on our mountain.

  Soon it will be hemmed in with gardens,

  because in outskirts like this they say

  the air is better, and it’s easier to live:

  so it will be cut into plots of land,

  and many lines of scaffolding will cross it.

  They will straighten my mountain passes.

  All my ravines will be upended.

  There must be people who want to bring happiness

  into their home, to have happiness.

  Happiness at home! Love without fiction.

  Imagine: without any stretching of sinews.

  I have to be a woman to endure this!

  (There was happiness – when you used to come,

  happiness – in my home.) Love without any extra

  sweetness given by parting. Or a knife.

  Now on the ruins of our happiness

  a town will grow: of husbands and wives.

  And in that blessed air, while

  you can, everyone should sin –

  soon shopkeepers on holidays

  will be chewing the cud of their profits,

  thinking out new levels and corridors, as

  everything leads them back to their house!

  For there has to be someone who needs

  a roof with a stork’s nest!

  10

  Yet under the weight of these foundations

  the mountain will not forget the game.

  Though people go astray they must remember.

  And the mountain has mountains of time.

  Obstinate crevices and cracks remain;

  in summer homes, they’ll realise, too late,

  this is no hill, overgrown with families, but

  a volcano! Make money out of that!

  Can vineyards ever hold the danger

  of Vesuvius? A giant without fear cannot

  be bound with flax. And the delirium

  of lips alone has the same power:

  to make the vineyards stir and turn heavily,

  to belch out their lava of hate.

  Your daughters shall all become prostitutes

  and all your sons turn into poets!

  You shall rear a bastard child, my daughter!

  Waste your flesh upon the gypsies, son!

  May you never own a piece of fertile land

  you who take your substance from my blood.

  Harder than any cornerstone, as

  binding as the words of a dying man,

  I curse you: do not look for happiness

  upon my mountain where you move like ants!

  At some hour unforeseen, some time unknowable,

  you will realise, the whole lot of you, how

  enormous and without measure is

  the mountain of God’s seventh law.

  Epilogue

  There are blanks in memory cataracts

  on our eyes; the seven veils.

  I no longer remember you separately

  as a face but a white emptiness

  without true features. All – is a

  whiteness. (My spirit is one

  uninterrupted wound.) The chalk of

  details must belong to tailors!

  The dome of heaven was built in a single frame

  and oceans are featureless a mass of

  drops that cannot be distinguished. You

  are unique. And love is no detective.

  Let now some neighbour say whether your

  hair is black or fair, for he can tell.

  I leave that to physicians or watchmakers.

  What passion has a use for such details?

  You are a full, unbroken circle, a

  whirlwind or wholly turned to stone.

  I cannot think of you apart from

  love. There is an equals sign.

  (In heaps of sleepy down, and falls of

  water, hills of foam, there is

  a new sound, strange to my hearing,

  instead of I a regal we)

  and though life’s beggared now and

  narrowed into how things are

  still I cannot see you joined to

  anyone: a

  revenge of memory.

  finished 1 December 1924

  POEM OF THE END

  1

  A single post, a point of rusting

  tin in the sky

  marks the fated place we

  move to, he and I

  on time as death is

  prompt strangely

  too smooth the gesture of

  his hat to me

  menace at the edges of his

  eyes his mouth tight

  shut strangely too low is the

  bow he makes tonight

  on time? that false note in

  his voice, what

  is it the brain alerts to and the

  heart drops at?

  under that evil sky, that sign of

  tin and rust,

  Six o’clock. There he is waiting

  by the post.

  Now we kiss soundlessly, his

  lips stiff as

  hands are given to queens, or

  dead people thus

  round us the shoving elbows of

  ordinary bustle

  and strangely irksome rises the

  screech of a whistle

  howls like a dog screaming

  angrier, longer: what

  a nightmare strangeness life is

  at death point

  and that nightmare reached my waist

  only last night

  and now reaches the stars, it has

  grown to its true height

  crying silently love love until

  – Has it gone

  six, shall we go to the cinema?

  I shout it: home!

  2

  And what have we come to?

  tents of nomads

  thunder and drawn swords over

  our heads, some

  terror we expect

  listen houses

  collapsing in the one

  word: home.

  It is the whine of a cossetted

  child lost, it is the

  noise a baby makes for

  give and mine.

  Brother in dissipation, cause

  of this cold fever, you

  hurry now to get home just

  as men rush in leaving

  like a horse jerking the

  line rope down in the dust.

  Is there even a building there?


  Ten steps before us.

  A house on the hill no higher a

  house on the top of the hill and

  a window under the roof is it

  from the red sun alone

  it is burning? or is it my life

  which must begin again? how

  simple poems are: it means I

  must go out into the night

  and talk to

  who shall I tell my sorrow

  my horror greener than ice?

  – You’ve been thinking too much.

  A solemn answer: yes.

  3

  And the embankment I hold

  to water thick and solid as

  if we had come to the hanging

  gardens of Semiramis

  to water a strip as colourless

  as a slab for corpses

  I am like a female singer holding

  to her music. To this wall.

  Blindly for you won’t return

  or listen, even if I bend to

  the quencher of all thirst, I am

  hanging at the gutter of a roof.

  Lunatic. It is not the river

  (I was born naiad) that makes me

  shiver now, she was a hand I held

  to, when you walked beside me, a lover

  and faithful.

  The dead are faithful

  though not to all in their cells; if

  death lies on my left now,

  it is at your side I feel it.

  Now a shaft of astonishing light, and

  laughter that cheap tambourine.

  – You and I must have a talk. And

  I shiver: let’s be brave, shall we?

  4

  A blonde mist, a wave of

  gauze ruffles, of human

  breathing, smoky exhalations

  endless talk the smell of

  what? of haste and filth

  connivance shabby acts all

  the secrets of business men

  and ballroom powder.

  Family men like bachelors

  move in their rings like middle-aged boys

  always joking always laughing, and

  calculating, always calculating

  large deals and little ones, they are

  snout-deep in the feathers of some

  business arrangement

  and ballroom powder.

  (I am half-turned away is this

  our house? I am not mistress here)

  Someone over his cheque book

  another bends to a kid glove

  a third works at a delicate foot

  in patent leather furtively the smell

  rises of marriage-broking

  and ballroom powder.

  In the window is the silver

  bite of a tooth: it is the Star of Malta,

  which is the sign of stroking, of the love

  that leads to pawing and to pinching.

  (Yesterday’s food perhaps but

  nobody worries if it smells slightly)

  of dirt, commercial tricks

  and ballroom powder.

  The chain is too short perhaps even

  if it is not steel but platinum?

  Look how their three chins shake

  like cows munching their own veal

  above their sugared necks

  the devils swing on a gas lamp

  smelling of business slumps

  and another powder

  made by Berthold Schwartz

  genius

  intercessor for people:

  – You and I must have a talk

  – Let’s be brave, shall we?

  5

  I catch a movement of his

  lips, but he won’t

  speak – You don’t love me?

  – Yes, but in torment

  drained and driven to death

  (He looks round like an eagle)

  – You call this home? That’s

  in the heart. – What literature!

  Love is flesh, it is a

  flower flooded with blood.

  Did you think it was just a

  little chat across a table

  a snatched hour and back home again

  the way gentlemen and ladies

  play at it? Either love is…

  – A shrine?

  – or else a scar.

  A scar every servant and guest

  can see (and I think silently:

  love is a bow-string pulled

  back to the point of breaking).

  Love is a bond. That has snapped for

  us our mouths and lives part

  (I begged you not to put a

  spell on me that holy hour

  close on mountain heights of

  passion memory is mist).

  Yes, love is a matter of gifts

  thrown in the fire, for nothing

  The shellfish crack of his mouth

  is pale, no chance of a smile:

  – Love is a large bed.

  – Or else an empty gulf.

  Now his fingers begin to

  beat, no mountains

  move. Love is –

  – Mine: yes.

  I understand. And so?

  The drum beat of his fingers

  grows (scaffold and square)

  – Let’s go, he says. For me, let’s

  die, would be easier.

  Enough cheap stuff rhymes

  like railway hotel rooms, so:

  – love means life although

  the ancients had a different

  name.

  – Well?

  – A scrap

  of handkerchief in a fist

  like a fish. – Shall we go? – How,

  bullet rail poison

  death anyway, choose! I make no

  plans. A Roman, you

  survey the men still alive

  like an eagle:

  Let’s say goodbye.

  6

  I didn’t want this, not

  this (but listen, quietly,

  to want is what bodies do

  and now we are ghosts only).

  And yet I didn’t say it

  though the time of the train is set

  and the sorrowful honour of leaving

  is a cup given to women

  or perhaps in madness I

  misheard you polite liar:

  is this the bouquet that you give your

  love, this blood-stained honour?

  Is it? Sound follows

  sound clearly: was it goodbye

  you said? (as sweetly casual

  as a handkerchief dropped without

  thought) in this battle

  you are Caesar (What an

  insolent thrust, to put the

  weapon of defeat, into my hand

  like a trophy). It continues. To

  sound in my ears. As I bow.

  – Do you always pretend

  to be forestalled in breaking?

  Don’t deny this, it

  is a vengeance of Lovelace,

  a gesture that does you credit

  while it lifts the flesh

  from my bones. Laughter the laugh of

  death. Moving. Without desire.

  That is for others now

  we are shadows to one another.

  Hammer the last nail in

  screw up the lead coffin.

  – And now a last request.

  – Of course. – Then say nothing

  about us to those who will

  come after me. (The sick

  on their stretchers talk of spring.)

  – May I ask the same thing?

  – Perhaps I should give you a ring?

  – No. Your look is no longer open.

  The stamp left on your heart

  would be the ring on your hand

  So now without any scenes

  I must swallow, silently, furtively.

  – A book then? – No, you give
those

  to everyone, don’t even write them

  books…

  So now must be no

  so now must be no

  must be no crying

  In wandering tribes of

  fishermen brothers

  drink without crying

  dance without crying

  their blood is hot, they

  pay without crying

  pearls in a glass

  melt, as they run their

  world without crying

  Now I am going and this

  Harlequin gives his

  Pierrette a bone like

  a piece of contempt

  He throws her the honour

  of ending the curtain, the last

  word when one inch of lead in

  the breast would be hotter and better

  Cleaner. My teeth

  press my lips. I can

  stop myself crying

  pressing the sharpness

  into the softest

  so without crying

  so tribes of nomads

  die without crying

  burn without crying.

  So tribes of fishermen

  in ash and song can

  hide their dead man.

  7

  And the embankment. The last one.

  Finished. Separate, and hands apart

  like neighbours avoiding one another. We