FRUITS POMEGRANATE You tell me I am wrong. Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong? I am not wrong. In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women, No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate-trees in flower, Oh so red, and such a lot of them. Whereas at Venice Abhorrent, green, slippery city Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes, In the dense foliage of the inner garden Pomegranates like bright green stone, And barbed, barbed with a crown. Oh, crown of spiked green metal Actually growing! Now in Tuscany, Pomegranates to warm your hands at; And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns Over the left eyebrow. And, if you dare, the fissure! Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure? Do you prefer to look on the plain side? For all that, the setting suns are open. The end cracks open with the beginning: Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure. Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure? No glittering, compact drops of dawn? Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument, shown ruptured? For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack. San Gervasio in Tuscany. PEACH Would you like to throw a stone at me? Here, take all that's left of my peach. Blood-red, deep; Heaven knows how it came to pass. Somebody's pound of flesh rendered up. Wrinkled with secrets And hard with the intention to keep them. Why, from silvery peach-bloom, From that shallow-silvery wine-glass on a short stem This rolling, dropping, heavy globule? I am thinking, of course, of the peach before I ate it. Why so velvety, why so voluptuous heavy? Why hanging with such inordinate weight? Why so indented? Why the groove? Why the lovely, bivalve roundnesses? Why the ripple down the sphere? Why the suggestion of incision? Why was not my peach round and finished like a billiard ball? It would have been if man had made it. Though I've eaten it now. But it wasn't round and finished like a billiard ball. And because I say so, you would like to throw something at me. Here, you can have my peach stone. San Gervasio. MEDLARS AND SORB-APPLES I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. I love to suck you out from your skins So brown and soft and coming suave, So morbid, as the Italians say. What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay: Stream within stream. Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine Or vulgar Marsala. Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity Soon in the pussy-foot West. What is it? What is it, in the grape turning raisin, In the medlar, in the sorb-apple, Wineskins of brown morbidity, Autumnal excrementa; What is it that reminds us of white gods? Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels, Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant As if with sweat, And drenched with mystery. Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns. I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld. A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment's orgasm of rupture, Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning. And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain, A new gasp of further isolation, A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves. Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone, The fibres of the heart parting one after the other And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied Like a flame blown whiter and whiter In a deeper and deeper darkness Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation. So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples The distilled essence of hell. The exquisite odour of leave-taking. Jamque vale! Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell. Each soul departing with its own isolation, Strangest of all strange companions, And best. Medlars, sorb-apples More than sweet Flux of autumn Sucked out of your empty bladders And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its music to yours, Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell And the ego sum of Dionysos The sono io of perfect drunkenness