‘It went like this,’ said the dark man, unclasping his hands before him and clasping them behind him, and at the same time placing the heel of his left shoe immediately in front of the toe of his right shoe so that the two feet formed a single and unbroken line of leather. ‘It went like this.’ He lifted his head. ‘But do not forget it is not Poetry – except perhaps for three singing lines at the outside.’
‘Well, for the love of Parnassus – let’s have it,’ broke in the petulant voice of Mr Thirst who, finding his thunder stolen, was no longer interested in good manners.
‘A-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ mused the man with the long blue jaw, who seemed to consider other people’s time and patience as inexhaustible commodities like air, or water, ‘a-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ (he lingered over the word like a nurse over a sick child), ‘there were those who said the whole thing sang; who hailed it as the purest poetry of our generation – “incandescent stuff” as one gentleman put it – but there you are – there you are – how is one to tell?’
‘Ah,’ whispered a voice of curds and whey. And a man with gold teeth turned his eyes to the lady with the sapphires, and they exchanged the arch expression of those who find themselves, however unworthily, to be witnesses at an historic moment.
‘Quiet please,’ said the poet. ‘And listen carefully.’
A mule at prayer! Ignore him: turn to me
Until the gold contraption of our love
Rattles its seven biscuit boxes, and the sea
Withdraws its combers from the rhubarb-grove.
This is no place for maudlin-headed fays
To smirk behind their mushrooms! ’t is a shore
For gaping daemons: it is such a place,
As I, my love, have long been looking for.
Here, where the rhubarb-grove into the wave
Throws down its rueful image, we can fly
Our kites of love, above the sandy grave
Of those long lost in ambiguity.
For love is ripest in a rhubarb-grove
Where weird reflections glimmer through the dawn:
O vivid essence vegetably wove
Of hues that die, the moment they are born.
Lost in the venal void our dreams deflate
By easy stages through green atmosphere:
Imagination’s bright balloon is late,
Like the blue whale, in coming up for air.
It is not known what genus of the wild
Black plums of thought best wrinkle, twitch and flow
Into sweet wisdom’s prune – for in the mild
Orchards of love there is no need to know.
What use to cry for Capricorn? it sails
Across the heart’s red atlas: it is found
Only within the ribs, where all the tails
The tempest has are whisking it around.
No time for tears: it is enough, today,
That we, meandering these granular shores
Should watch the ponderous billows at their play
Like midnight beasts with garlands in their jaws …
It was obvious that the poem was still in its early stages. The novelty of seeing so distinguished-looking a man behave in a manner so blatant, so self-centred, so withdrawn at one and the same time had intrigued Titus so keenly that he had outlasted at least thirty guests since the poem started. The lady with the sapphires and Mr Thirst had long since edged away, but a floating population surrounded the poet who had become sightless as he declaimed, and it would have been all the same to him if he had been alone in the room.
Titus turned his head away, his brain jumping in his skull with words and images.
TWENTY-THREE
Now that the poem was gone, and gone with it the poet, for truly he seemed to follow in the wake of something greater than himself, Titus became aware of a strange condition, a quality of flux, an agitation; a weaving or a threading motion – and then, all at once, one of those tidal movements that occur from time to time at crowded parties, began to manifest itself. There is nothing that can be done about them. They move to a rhythm of their own.
