Cavafy Read online

carrying just such an awful head.

  At the Café Door

  Something someone said nearby

  made me turn to the cafe door

  and I saw that beautiful body

  like one Love made as his finest try.

  In joy he shaped those balanced limbs

  exalted the sculptured height

  shaped the face in devotion

  and left his own impression

  by touch of hand at brow, lips, and eyes.

  He Swears

  He swears now and then to start a better life.

  But whenever night comes with its own advice

  compromises and promises

  but when night comes with its own power

  over a body that wants and searches, then

  lost, to the same fateful joy, he goes again.

  One Night

  The bedroom was cheap, vulgar

  secret over a dubious bar.

  From the window you’d see the alley

  dirty and narrow.

  Some working-hands’ voices

  came up from below.

  They were playing cards

  and having a party.

  There in that common, low-class bed

  I had love’s body, I had the lips

  voluptuous and rosy red of drunken rapture

  rosy red of such a drunken rapture

  that now as I write—after so many years—

  in my house by myself

  I am drunk with rapture again.

  Morning Sea

  Let me stand and let me look for a little at nature

  morning sea and cloudless sky

  bright violet-blue and lemon banks

  beautiful all and grandly lit.

  Let me stand here and let me fool myself that I see them

  (I did for a second really when first I took my stand)

  and not here too my fantasies

  my recollections, the images of pleasure.

  Painted

  I pay attention to my work. I love it.

  but composition is slow today.

  It takes the heart out of me.

  The day has had its effect:

  it is getting darker and darker

  it is blowing and it is raining.

  I really want to look more than to tell.

  In this painting now I look at

  a handsome boy stretched out

  for a nap near a spring

  tired out from running.

  What a handsome lad!

  What a god-descended noontime

  took him now to put him to sleep!

  A long time I sit and look just so.

  Then back at my art again

  I am resting from its toil.

  Orophernes

  This man on the tetradrachm looks

  as though there’s a smile on his face

  a beautiful face that, and fine,

  he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.

  Chased when a boy out of Cappadocia,

  out of the grand ancestral palace,

  sent to grow up in Ionia,

  and be forgotten among strangers .

  Ah, wondrous nights of Ionia

  where without fear he came to know

  all about pleasure, and Greek throughout,

  in his heart always Asian,

  but in manner and talk, a Greek,

  adorned with turquoises, Greek in dress,

  body fragrant with jasmine scent;

  and of the fair young men of Ionia

  he the fairest, closest to ideal.

  Afterwards, when the Syrians came

  into Cappadocia and made him king,

  he rushed upon kingship

  to find a new enjoyment every day,

  to grab and gather gold and silver,

  and cheerfully brag

  seeing piled up riches glisten.

  As for concern for the place, for administration,

  he did not know what was happening around him.

  The Cappadocians soon removed him

  and he went into exile to Syria, in the palace

  of Demetrius to idle and play.

  Yet one day unaccustomed reflections

  cut short his long idleness.

  He remembered that by his mother, Antiochis,

  and by that ancient Stratonice

  he descended from Syria’s crown,

  and was a Seleucid almost.

  Briefly he left off whoring and drinking

  ineptly, confusedly looked for a plot,

  something to do, something to plan,

  and failed pitiably and was annihilated.

  Somewhere his end must have been written and lost

  or maybe history had to pass it by,

  rightly did not condescend

  to signalize so meaningless a matter.

  This man on the tetradrachm

  left us the charm of his lovely youth,

  the light from his poetic beauty,

  a visible memento of a boy of Ionia,

  he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.

  The Battle of Magnesia

  He’d lost his old push, his verve,

  his tired body sick almost

  would chiefly get his care

  and the rest of his life

  he’d live unconcerned.

  This does Philip project at least.

  Tonight he plays dice,

  has an appetite for fun:

  Set the table with bunches of roses.

  So at Magnesia Antiochos is undone:

  utter destruction fell, they say,

  on the troops of his splendid host.

  They might have inflated it. It might not all be true.

  If only. They were, while enemies, family.

  Still it’s enough, a single “if only”

  Could even be too much.

  Philip—to be sure—will not put off his feast

  however tired from life he is.

  One good thing he keeps: his memory does not fail.

  He remembers how in Syria

  they made their lamentations

  the kind of sorrow they had

  when mother Macedonia turned ino sweepings.

  Now to dinner. Slaves! The flute players, lots of lights.

  Manuel Komnenos

  Lord King Manuel Komnenos

  one melancholy September day

  felt death near. The astrologers

  (paid) of the court babbled

  many more years would he live;

  but while they are talking he

  remembers old customary pieties

  orders from the monastery cells

  ecclesiastical garments to wear

  and wears them and happily displays

  the modest look of priest or monk.

  Happy all who believe

  and like Lord King Manuel end

  dressed most simply in their belief.

  The Seleucid’s Displeasure

  The Seleucid Demetrios was not pleased

  to hear that a Ptolemy had arrived

  in Italy in such poor shape:

  with three or four slaves only,

  wearing poor man’s clothes . . . on foot.

  That way now their families will be

  at Rome a mock, a laughing-stock.

  That at bottom they’d become

  a kind of serving staff to the Romans

  the Seleucid knows. That they give

  them their thrones without consultation

  and take them away as they like,

  he knows. But for looks at least,

  they might preserve some dignity,

  not to forget that they are still kings

  still—alas—called kings.

  For this the Seleucid Demetrios was upset

  and offered Ptolemy right off

  scarlet raiment, a shiny crown, precious jewels,

  many servants and attendants,

  his most expensive horses

 
; for Ptolemy to present himself at Rome

  as he ought, a Greek monarch

  of Alexander’s line.

  But the Lagid had come to beg.

  He knew his job and said No to all:

  he had no use for these fineries.

  Dressed in old clothes, he humbly entered Rome

  put up at the house of a lowly worker

  and then presented himself to the Senate

  wretched and poor in order thereby to secure

  as beggar a better outcome.

  When They Stir

  Try to keep them, poet,

  even though few, the ones that pause

  your visions of making love.

  Set them half-hidden in your phrases.

  Try to hold on to them, poet,

  when they stir in your mind

  at night or in the blaze of noon.

  On the Street

  His appealing face, a little pale,

  his brown eyes, as though tired,

  twenty-five years old, but more like twenty,

  something of the artist in his dress—

  the shade of his foulard, the shape of his collar—

  he walks aimlessly on the street

  as though hypnotized still by illicit pleasure,

  the wholly illicit pleasure he has had.

  Before the Statue of Endymion

  On a white chariot drawn by four mules

  perfectly white, and decked in silver

  I come from Miletos to Latmos

  celebrating rites—oblation and sacrifice—

  to Endymion. I sailed from Alexandria

  in a purple trireme.

  Here is the statue,

  and I in ecstasy now behold

  Endymion’s famous beauty.

  My slaves empty baskets of jasmine

  and auspicious acclamations

  rouse pleasure from ancient times.

  In Osroene’s City

  From a fight in the tavern

  they brought us my friend

  Remon hurt

  yesterday near midnight.

  The moon lit up on the bed

  through windows we left

  wide-open

  his wonderful body.

  We are a mix here

  Syrian, Greek, Armenian, Mede

  and so is Remon.

  But yesterday we thought

  when the moon lit up

  his lovely face

  of Plato’s Charmides.

  Passage

  What images he timidly imagined as a student

  they are out in the open now.

  He loafs about, stays up all night,

  and gets led astray. And as it is

  (for our Art) it is right. Sensual pleasure

  delights in his blood, young and hot.

  A rapture of outlaw love conquers his body;

  his youthful limbs surrender to that love.

  Just so does a simple boy earn our due regard,

  and even passes suddenly

  to the High World of Poetry,

  the sensuous boy with blood young and hot.

  For Ammones Who Died, Age 29, in 610

  Raphael, a few lines please,

  an epitaph for Ammones the poet,

  something of exquisite sensibility

  and smooth. You can do it.

  You are the right one to compose

  what is right for our own Ammones the poet.

  Of course you will speak of his poems

  but talk about his beauty too

  the delicate beauty we loved.

  Always your Greek has beauty and music

  but now we need all your technical skill

  our love and grief are passing into a foreign tongue.

  Pour your Egyptian feeling into that foreign tongue.

  Raphael, your lines are to be written

  to hold—you know—something of our life within

  where rhythm and every phrase make clear

  an Alexandrian writes of an Alexandrian.

  A God of Theirs

  When one of Them would come to Seleucia

  to the market around the evening hour,

  a tall and perfectly beautiful young man

  with joy in his eyes, incorruptible,

  and black and perfumed hair,

  the strollers would look

  and one would ask another if he knew him:

  was he a Greek from Syria or a stranger?

  But some who were watching more closely

  would understand and move aside

  and while he was getting lost from sight

  below the stoas in the shadows and evening lights

  going to the quarter that lives only at night

  with orgies and debauch and every kind

  of rapture and thrill

  musing, who of Them might he be?

  What suspect pleasure brought him down

  to the streets of Seleucia

  from the Revered, All-Holy Residence?

  At Evening

  It would not anyhow have lasted very long

  years of experience show me this.

  Still, Fate was somehow in a hurry

  to come and put it to an end.

  But how potent were the scents.

  What a wonderful bed we went to.

  To what pleasure we gave our bodies.

  A reminiscence of the days of pleasure

  a reminiscence of the days came to me

  something from our youth, us two, the heat.

  I took up in my hands again a letter

  and I read it over and over

  until there was no light.

  I went out on the balcony, sadly.

  I went out to change my thoughts

  by looking at least at a small part

  of my beloved city, a small part

  of the traffic in streets and shops.

  To Pleasure

  Remembering hours when

  I found and had pleasure

  the way I liked it

  is Joy and the Scent of Life:

  Joy and the Scent of Life it is

  for me that I turned my back

  on any sort of enjoyment

  of routine modes of love.

  Grey

  Looking at an opal, half grey

  I remember two grey eyes, good-looking

  I saw some twenty years ago.

  One month we were lovers, and he left—

  Smyrna, I think, to work.

  We never saw each other any more.

  They’ll have lost their beauty

  those grey eyes, if he’s alive.

  The handsome face will have spoiled.

  Keep them, Memory, as they were

  And Memory, as much as you can

  of this love of mine, as much as you can

  bring me back tonight.

  Iasis’ Grave

  I, Iasis, lie here, of this great city,

  an ephebe celebrated for beauty:

  the profoundly wise admired me,

  as did the simple superficial folk,

  and I liked equally both.

  But everybody made of me Narcissus and Hermes,

  abuses used me up and killed me. Passerby,

  if you are Alexandrian, you will not criticize.

  You know the rush of our life . . .

  what heat . . . what overwhelming sensual pleasure.

  In the Month of Athyr

  With trouble I read on the ancient stone

  LORD JESUS CHRIST. I make out SO[U]L.

  IN THE MON[TH] ATHYR

  LUCIU[S] CAME [TO] REST

  A mention of his age YEARS L[IV]ED

  TWENTY-SEVEN shows he went young to rest.

  Among obliterations HIM . . . FROM ALEXANDRIA

  Thereafter three lines badly mutilated

  but I get some words like PAIN. OUR T[E]ARS

  and TEARS again below and GRIEF FO[R US] HIS [F]RIENDS.

  Lucius, I think, wo
uld have been greatly loved.

  In the month of Athyr Lucius went to his rest.

  I’ve Looked So Hard

  I’ve looked so hard at beauty

  my eyes are full of it all:

  body lines, red lips, voluptuous limbs

  hair as if lifted from Greek statues

  always beautiful even uncombed

  falling a little over white foreheads

  love’s faces as my poetry wanted them

  faces in nights when I was young

  faces encountered in secret on nights of my own.

  Ignatius’ Tomb

  Here I am not that Kleon

  famous in Alexandria

  (where they are hard to impress)

  for my nice houses and gardens

  and horses and carts

  and the diamonds and silks I wore

  Away with all that!

  I am not that Kleon here.

  Abrogate please his 28 years

  I am Ignatius, a reader

  who came around very late

  but nevertheless just the same

  I lived 10 happy months

  in the peace and assurance of Christ.

  Days of 1903

  I never found them again—lost so fast—

  the poetic eyes, the face

  pale . . . at nightfall . . . on the street.

  I never found them again

  what I only had by chance

  what I relinquished so lightly

  and wanted thereafter in anguish

  the eyes, poetic, the face pale

  those lips, I never found them again.

  The Tobacconist’s Window

  By a window brightly lighted

  of a smoke shop they stood

  in the midst of too many people.

  By chance their glances met

  and told of outlaw carnal wanting

  timidly, with hesitation.

  Then a few nervous steps on the sidewalk

  until they smiled and nodded

  yes just barely.

  Then the closed conveyance

  the sensuous nearness of bodies

  hands together, lips together.

  Caesarion

  Partly to fix an era in my mind