Dionysiac (1966)

Aquavit and beer to chase it

On the patio, narrow between broken walls,

And a black bird from Java in a Steinberg cage

Whistling in the sun.

After the aquavit (a wedding relic), Scotch

With beer to chase it; and after the Scotch,

Vodka.

Meanwhile Antonia Vivaldi ran his Seasons

Hi-fi all four of them fiddling the flame to the sun’s smouldering quiet.

Then the flamenco. Whereupon

Up rose Bernardino

And shuffled a slow dance

Seagull-eyed and penguin-footed

Up and along the path in a reverie of castanets

Self-enwrapped, self-in-the-sun-enchanted.

More eloquent even the stillness of the silent girl

Whose blue unseasonable eyes and quiet hands

Incarnadined the air with the tendrilled passion.

The dreaming dance of her stillness shapes in its fingers her heart

            to a helix of flame;

Her eyes are lapis lazuli in a crystal skull.

The music will never end. Her hands, as still as birds,

Renounce all motion, enclosed in the flame of her silence

While the sun stands still and the bird pours down its indolent

            song unregarding.

Here by the brooks of desire and in the mountains

The sacrificial torches run indecorous through groves of sleep

Hounding the dainty antelopes, soft to the touch,

Till they lie dismembered, and their eyes filled with darkness.

 

Now while the sun is high, while the music revolves

As unregarding and blank as that bird’s bright eye,

The patio is desolate and the house empty.

If there is life still, it does not move and there is no sign of it.

The garrulous silence of an abdicated sorrow falls

Whimpering from dark to dark through the aching spaces of the mind

And the frenzy of this torrential sacrament

Is gathered into a quiet cage

Ingeniously constructed

Of blazing music, birdsong, and a grave dance

In a narrow place between broken walls.