[Dichtung]

Lawrence Durrell
Cavafy
I like to see so much the old man's loves
Egregious if you like and often shabby
Protruding from the ass's skin of verse,
For better or for worse,
The bones of poems cultured by a thirst —
Dilapidated taverns, dark eyes washed
Now in the wry and loving brilliance
Of such barbaric memories
As held them when the dyes of passion ran.
No cant about the sottishness of man!

The forest of dark eyes he mused upon,
Out of ikons, waking beside his own
In stuffy brothels on stained mattresses,
Watched by the melting vision of the flesh,
Eros the tutor of our callowness
Deployed like ants across his ageing flesh
The crises of great art, the riders
Of love, their bloody lariats whistling,
The cries locked in the quickened breath,
The love-feast of a sort of love-in-death.

And here I find him great. Never
To attempt a masterpiece of size —
You must leave life for that. No
But always to preserve the adventive
Minute, never to destroy the truth
Admit the coarse manipulations of the lie.
If only the brown fingers franking his love
Could once be fixed in art, the immortal
Episode be recorded — there he would awake

On a fine day to shed his acts like scabs,
The trespasses on life and living slake

In the taste, not of his death but of his dying:
And like the rest of us he died still trying.