Chapter I: Front Matter

POEMS & POÈMES

autres alliances

Par

NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY

ÉMILE-PAUL FRÈRES ÉDITEURS A PARIS

GEORGE H. DORAN Co ÉDITORS NEW-YORK

1920

CONTENTS

Apology
Ah! Night
The Love of Judas
The Weeping Venus
More Night!
The Phantom Guest
Double Being
Singing
On a Picture to Music
Loves Comrades
With two dwarf Japanese maples
Avertissement
The Flute-Player
A Parisian Roof Garden in 1918
How Write the Beat of Love
A la Campagne
A Pilgrimage
Backward
A Sonnet to My Lady with the Jaundice
Easter Day
Lines taken from Poems I shall not write
I Built a Fire
How Cold
Habit
The Near Enemy
Life

APOLOGY

While blue and khaki share the heroes mud,
And women tend in white or weep in grey,
Though all expressiveness seems over-dressed,
Yet some must wear the colours of their hearts
Upon their sleeves, like troubadours, of old;
And sing, and sometimes write their singing down.

... To "chase them from republics" were as vain
As to disturb the hurdy-gurdy man.
Let him go grinding music as he likes;
You see him turn his wheel, but need not hear
The tune he's playing in the noisy street?...

(Some have an organ, some an axe to grind,
While others seek how best to bury hatchets.)
We all are poets in our different ways
And may your dreams be harmless as my own.

AH! NIGHT!

Ah! night!
To feel the stab of beauty at the heart!
To drink, with lifted throat,
The silent throb and music of the stars,
The first kiss of the spring on spell-bound trees,
To stretch out arms to hold and soothe the world,
--A love too vast in aught to be contained,
Helpless and great: a poets youthfulness,...

Alone, might all this emptiness be you!

_May first 1915_

THE LOVE OF JUDAS

Love, take me back to you, and make me whole,
Who am divided and in unbelief:
An infidel in thought and word and grief,
A double heart and a promiscuous soul!

And what if Judas offered Christ that bowl
Of greatest bitterness without relief.
Revenge, not silver, tempted such a thief:
Betrayed betrayer of the kiss he stole.

He loved the most; those others loved but well,
They drowsed: in dreadful paths his anguish trod,
Nor thrice denied the love that sold his God.

No pity for his throbbing jealous side,
No pity for his false obscure farewell;
Yet he alone for his lost master died!

THE WEEPING VENUS

by Romaine

Laid out as dead in moonlight shroud
Beneath a derelict of cloud:
A double wreckage safe from flight,
High-caged as grief, in prisoned night.--
Unseeing eyes whose clustering tears
Tell the pure crystal of her years.--
No crown of thorns, no wounded side,
Yet as the God-man crucified,
Her body expiates the sin
That love and life with her begin!

MORE NIGHT!

Moon-love, star-love, the love of silver water.
The weeping face of love touched in the dark,
And murdered joy, lost souls of joy that caught her
A glow-worm's warmth and spark.

Birds of prey, invisible, now hover
About her midnights hammocked in unrest--
A moving shadow, faithless as a lover,
Is all her arms have pressed--

Too luminous the dreaming of the sleeper
Whose tears are prophecies and second-sight.
Has death no under-sea, no darkness deeper,
In which to satiate our need of night?

THE PHANTOM GUEST

We lay in shade diaphanous
And spoke the light that burns in us

As in the glooming's net I caught her,
She shimmered like reflected water!

Romantic and emphatic moods
Are not for her whom life eludes...

Its vulgar tinsel round her fold?
She'd rather shudder with the cold,

Attend just this elusive hour,
A shadow in a shadow bower,

A moving imagery so fine,
It must have been her soul near mine

And so we blended and possessed
Each in each the phantom guest,

Inseparate, we scarcely met;
Yet other love-nights we forget!

DOUBLE BEING

A northern mind, a face from Italy,
A double fate lived all too fatally,
A look fresh as a childs, both soft and sharp,
A clarion-voice, then liquid as a harp!
A natural being, yet from nature freed,
Like a Shakespearean boy of fairy breed--
A sex perplexed into attractive seeming--
Both sex at best, the strangeness so redeeming!--
Hands hard to loosen if for once they cling,
Yet frail as Leicester's wearing a queen's ring.
A page-clothed Rosalind to play a part,
A brow of genius and a lonely heart.

SINGING

Ethereal vibrations
And soulful pulsations
Of song,
Afloat on the air
--More aspiring than prayer--
How strong
The wings that uplift!
As soaring adrift,
A throng
Of angels there are,
And an echoing star,
As along
You rise ever higher,
Sole voice of a choir
How long
Shall we follow your flight,
Through crystaline night,
And belong
--Through the high vaults of space--
To your archangel's face,
And long,
--With the heavens still ringing--
To be one with your singing?

ON A PICTURE TO MUSIC

Music, language of the mortal soul.
The face of twilight,
The mouth of bitterness made lyrical,
Eyes closed on poignant joys that might have been!
A profile turned to life, and yet beyond ...
Reborn, transfigured; penetrating sense
To gather an acute expressiveness
Vibrant within itself: all our lost lives!
--We must play gently to the living dead--
Fingers outstretched, by that responsive lid
Where Angel harps lie buried at full length,
Yet still in touch and resonant--Arise
To laying on of hands--
Invisible, a phantom of pure sound
Voices the spirit sitting there, awakes
The sighing, and the soaring and the beat
(O dispossessed and silenced King: my heart!)
Until we too are echos of that tide,
Where winds and waves become articulate,
Our being tossed so high, beyond itself,
Winged by the elements!
Our human weight of woe no longer felt
Until we meet
--By some familiar fall of minor chords--
The inner God of Sorrow face to face.

LOVE'S COMRADES

You say I've lived too long in France
And wearied of the senses' dance?

Like fresh air in an opium den
You'll lead me out--to where? and when?

.... I fear no country's ready yet
For our complexities: forget
The best of flesh and food to go
A'roaming o'er the world, and know
Discomfort's great surprises few--?
No, let me travel just to you!

WITH TWO DWARF JAPANESE MAPLES

These ancient trees for your new room.
May many happy evenings fall
With their reflections on the wall,
Making embroideries of the gloom,
And let their leaves of red and green
Rustle with small desires and fears,
But never water them with tears
For all that is or has not been.
Lives pass as shadows on a screen,
Whether you dream or sing or sew,
Or if some time Regret instead
Should bow, my Loveliest, your head,
Send me a leaf so I shall know:
For Hope the green, for Love the red.

AVERTISSEMENT.

_Her name begins as Love begins,_
_Mine as "November", "Nevermore"._

No thousand nights and one between these covers,
No miniatures, enluminures or dyes--
For art is but a prostitute that hovers
To court outsiders--you alone may prize
These pages which your idle hand unties?--

... Leaving art to artists--we, loves lovers,
Keep for out-worn Beauty a disguise.
--(A line traced round a shadow as it dies,
Some semblance of the scattered rose recovers?)--
So making everything seem otherwise:
Associations are our deities!
--And ivy leaves, transparent eggs of plovers
Are fragments of the feast they symbolize.--

Here, visible as sleeping Eros, lies
A book of dreams and broken memories,
A living past for which blind Love has eyes?

THE FLUTE-PLAYER

Her flute's clear solo greets the maiden day--
Above the waking of melodious May,
Its notes are like a trellised flight of flowers.

The chirping birds whose orchestra of bills
Accompanies rain--the tea-rose best distills--
And then the smell of earth between the showers!

From garden bright, in drops of crystal gown'd,
I hear the breezes make a leafy sound
Through vibrant buzz of flies that seek the shade--

... And wonder whether--as sweet noon reposes--
The roses make the air, the air the roses
Within the house kept cooler than a glade.

Against the wall, upon the sunny side,
Their fruitful branches fixed and crucified,
The pear-trees stretch out arms in martyred line--

While we that surfeit, nap, as calyx'd bees,
Who murmurs, still pursuing imageries
... «Like Jewish candelabras». (relight mine!)

Rising as to welcome a newcomer
The flute pipes to the first eve of the summer
--Nocturnal nature moves to minor bars--

A golden crescent in a druid's tree
Reminds her that the forest has a key--
And out she goes to serenade the stars!

A PARISIAN ROOF GARDEN IN 1918

As I must mount to feed those doves of ours,
Perhaps you too will spend nocturnal hours
Upon your roof
So high aloof
That from its terraced bowers
We catch at clouds and draw a bath from showers.
Before the moon has made all pale the night,
Let's meet with flute and viol, and supper light:
A yew lamb, minted sauce, a raisined bun,
A melon riper than the melting sun--
A flask of Xeres, that we've scarce begun--
Well try the «lunar waltz» while floats afar
Upon the liquid night--night's nenuphar.
Or else, with senses tuned alike perchance,
Reclining love will make the heavens dance;
And if the enemy from aerial cars
Drops death, we'll share it vibrant with the stars!

HOW WRITE THE BEAT OF LOVE

How write the beat of love, the very throb,
The rhythm of our veins' deep eloquence?
How fix that darkness-rending final sob,
That perfect swoon of each united sense.

The full-sailed rising of your body's sweep
--Adrift and safe on joy's last tidal wave--
Will toss you on the silver sands of sleep,
Forgetful of the ecstacy you gave.

Your breath ebbs restful as the falling tide:
A sea becalmed!... Lay me in valleyed part
Of breasts whose undulating crests subside--
Ah how they marked the high beats of your heart!

A LA CAMPAGNE

The night, whose silences detach each sound,
The leaves, as whispering heralds in a wood,
Stir hopes of you about my solitude.
Was that a carriage wheel upon the ground?
--The grassy ground that brings the road uphill
Would muffle horses hoofs--I listen still--
A nervous motion at my heart: the bound
Of too responsive veins--a hush profound.

I hear a night bird call its mate?... a hound
Out on the farm bark at some peasant maid
Too tired with harvesting to feel afraid.
... Loosed, and now tied, scenting the sunny air,
All day she combed and tossed the fields' dim hair,
As some mute servant tending a fair queen
She works in beauty neither felt nor seen,
While I have nature, all the whole earth over,
For company. Yet anxious as a lover
Prisoned in sentiment, I watch and start.
Is it then just for you I live apart?
The moon, as milk caught in a pail, now flows
Over its rim, whit'ning the dark that glows--
I saw your absence less by day, and less
This summers brilliant, living emptiness.