It is too far to hear the singing

Matapan
by Lawrence Durrell

Unrevisited perhaps forever
Southward from the capes of smoke
Where past and present to the waters are one
And the peninsula's end points out
Three fingers down the night:
On a corridor of darkness a beam
To where the islands, at last, the islands . . .

Abstract and more lovely Andros Delos and Santorin,
Transpontine headlands in crisp weather,
Cries amputated by the gulls,
Formless, yet made in marble
Whose calm insoluble statues wear
Stone vines for hair, forever sharing
A sea-penumbra, the darkened arc
Where mythology walks in a wave
And the islands are.

Leaving you, hills, we were unaware
Or only as sleepwalkers are aware
Of a key turned in the heart, a letter
Posted under the door of an empty house;
Now Matapan and her forebodings
Became an identity, a trial of conduct,
Rolled and unrolled by the surges
Like a chart, mapped by a star,
With thistle and trefoil blowing,
An end of everything known
A beginning of water.

Here sorrow and beauty shared
Like time and place an eternal relation,
Matapan...

Here we learned that the lover
Is contained by love, not containing,
Matapan, Matapan:

Here the lucky in summer
Tied up their boats; a mile from land
The cicada's small machine came like a breath;
Touching bottom saw their feet become
Webbed and monstrous on the sandy floors.
Here wind emptied the snowy caves: the brown
Hands about the tiller unbuckled.
Day lay like a mirror in the sun's eye.
Olives sleeping, rocks hanging, sea shining
And under Arbutus the scriptural music
Of a pipe beside a boy beside a bay
Soliloquised in seven liquid quibbles.

Here the lucky in summer
Made fast like islanders
And saw upon the waters, leaning down
The haunted eyes in faces torn from books:
So painted the two dark-blue Aegean eyes
And θεσζ δικαισζ 'God the Just'
Under them upon the rotting prows.

Inhabitants of reflection going:
We saw the dog-rose abloom in bowls,
Faces of wishing children in the wells
Under the Acropolis the timeless urchin
Carrying the wooden swallow,
Teller of the spring; on the hills of hair
Over Athens saw the night exhaling.

Later in islands, awaiting passage,
By waters like skin and promontories,
Were blessed by the rotation
Of peach-wind, melon-wind,
Fig-wind and wind of lemons;
Every fruit in the rotation of its breath.
And in the hills encountered
Sagacious and venerable faces
Like horn spoons: forms of address:
Christian names, politeness to strangers.

Heard the ant's pastoral reflections:
`Here 1 go to Arcadia, one two
Saffron, sage, bergamot, rue,
A root, a hair, a bead—all warm.
A human finger swarming
With little currents: a ring:
A married man.'

In a late winter of mist and pelicans
Saw the thread run out at last; the man
Kiss his wife and child good-bye
Under the olive-press, turning on a heel.
To enter April like swimmer,
And memory opened in him like a vein,
Pushed clear on the tides a pathless keel.

Standing alone on the hills
Saw all Greece, the human
Body of this sky suspending a world
Within a crystal turning,
Guarded by the green wicks of cypresses.

Far out on the blue
Like notes of music on a page
The two heads: the man and his wife.
They are always there.

It is too far to hear the singing.