"She never looked like Sappho"*
I
Take me dear Vita
from London to Bagdag not to Sevenoaks.
Motor me along in that car so blue
as your silk undergarment.
Come round in the owling time, stark naked
and be to my thighs what the fern
is to the spring breeze.
Stop the grey watches of the night.
Fill the Sussex downs
with the larks of your kisses,
with the smell of red hibiscus in bloom.
Dear Vita,
let's sit under the laburnums
and watch a white horse
munching in the marsh.
Take me faraway from the hoary
old ladies and gents in tweeds.
II
The beauty is entirely colour
and you are entirely pink and green
-that's a lark
to my soul here
in the gloomy Hebrides
talking to gannets and clouds.
Now I smell geraniums,
earth mould, grilled salmon.
I dance with the gannets,
with the hissing shadow of your smile
"Oh you make such a figure
in the forest
coming out of a glade,
yellow, golden.
Oh you old serpent,
cold moonshine,
how you coil in your basket of red fig leaves."
I am going to smell the waves
redolent of the secret rose
between your white thighs.
Now the sky is like a Canaletto
because I daydream of you.
III
Leonard's clipping the yews, my Jew,
and I trim the blue lupins you gave me
some moons, some caresses ago
when you gathered my hair unwashed
in a bun at the back of my head
reeking of mushroom and haddock.
Notwithstanding you kiss my greyish locks
and the wet-pink porpoise throbbing
inside the secret rose.
Leonard's clipping the yews, my Jew,
but I long for hibiscus, the South Seas,
groves of lilac, acres of peach-blossom
in Persia with you.
IV
Mozart on the gramophone,
a blast of lightning
over the Mount Caburn,
a white owl just crossing the meadow.
"Limelight is bad for me, Donkey West,
the best light for my love is twilight."
My fingers slip into your bossom
like a squirrel among brown nuts.
"The dream of my life: to be a tropical fish
swimming in a submerged forest"
I open the top button of your yellow
jersey of zingaro women who read
palms and cards and stars
by the sickle side of the moon.
And pull off your trousers of Abyssinian
Empress seduced by an Ecuadorian slave.
There is a green caterpillar in your hair.
I ate it...
Not the lively squirrel already
lost in the deepest rained forest of you.
Mozart on the gramophone,
the white owl
is crossing the water meadows
afresh.
I pry into the stars
through my telescope,
none has the brightness
of your violet eyes
at noon.
V
More than Tottenham Court Road
I prefer nightingales. orange flowers.
Have me lunch under cypresses, frogs
chanting to the Italian moon
like a glimmery lemon in the sky...
Lucca,
San Gimignano,
Piacenza.
Bury me, Vita, in Monte Oliveto
where the bones walk and talk
the language of oxen, streams
and olive groves,
my soul becoming the flames
of blue candles to the Madonna for rain.
Volterra,
Lerici,
the purple bay where Shelley
was drown into the stars..
.Spotorno.
Dogs.
Iridiscent flowers.
I forgot Whitsuntide.
Even Leonard's forgotten,
not the sunrise seen
from the Pink Tower
with you and a basket full of quinces.
Addio carissima sorella mia
I follow the instinct
of the artichokes for the sun,
and the sun for the vines leaves,
the scorching Dionysian earth.
I follow the purple sea,
the heady scent of pine and oleanders.
"I rang you up all for the sound of your lovely
voice like a bird piping through a hawthorn hedge
but heard only buzz buzz buzz"
I follow the aquamarine smell
of the waves(not my Waves)
frothing
melting
into the infinitude
of Shelley's ashes.
VI
Just when my mind is
in full fettle again
I begin to doubt in beautiful words.
Sparrows rising in flocks
from the Enbankment
at my usual hour between the lights
now walking across London
I remember the great joy of smelling
a dead horse in Athens
while the bees boomed over
the tomb of Agamemnon.
The systolic action of my heart is
too wild wild. wild
just when my body is
in full fettle again
why don't I see you now
from the top of Hampstead Heath?
But you are in the Indian Ocean
reading Proust or looking at whales.
I startle a big swan sleeping
on the misty river bank
just when I arise from dreams of thee
in the jolly fields of Kent
I begin to doubt in beautiful words.
None of them could ever describe
your red jersey dimming in lontananza
like the most melancholy sunset:
just when I long for love
two comma buttlerflies
copulate on the lilies,
but you never collected butterflies
and I am not destined to die
like a rose in aromatic pain.
VII
The music-box plays Daisy, Daisy
give me your answer, do.
Bad Vita,
bad wicked Vita,
don't go to Egypt,
stay in England, love Virginia,
take her in your arms.
Let's go to watch flamingos
in Richmond Park:
they are pink like the fig
you proffered me that night.
Virginia enjoys sitting with Vita
in Kew Gardens
under a cloudy sky to bicker on
feminism, Spanish wines
and copulation.
Bad wicked Vita, Vita:
give me your answer, do.
I didn't take chloral
this morning at 4:30,
in love of you didn't sleep
...and visioned you in my mind
in the nude,
stamping out hops in Kent,
brown as a satyr,
dancing a Negro rag...
Should I bloom a maiden once more?
Leonard's eating oysters by the apple trees.
*Between the Acts,1941
