One Grey Greek Stone

One Grey Greek Stone
by Lawrence Durrell

Capes hereabouts and promontories hold
Boats grazing a cyclopean eyeball,
No less astounding
Snow-tusked or toffee-rounded hill
In shaggy presences of rock abounding
Charm the sick disputing will.

Old dusty gems of bays go flop:
Water polishes on a sleeve and buffs,
Trembles upon an eyelash into stars.
How strange our breathing does not stop.
One sovereign absence should be quite enough?

Tell me, the open codes of flowers,
Lick up the glance to pocket a whole mind.
Nothing precipitates, is left behind,
The island is all eyes.
The silence ponders, notes, and codifies.
We discover only what we set out to find.

I am at a loss to explain how writing
Turns this way this year, turns and tends –
But the line breaks off as voices do, and ends.

Image coiled in image, eye in eye,
Copying each other like guesses where the water
Only dares swallow up and magnify,
So precise the quiet spools
Surpass the freckled fishy schools,
Gather, forgive, heap up and lie.

Under such stones to sleep would be
The deepest luxury of the deliberate soul,
By day’s revivals or the plumblue fall
Of darkness bending like a hoop the whole –
Desires beyond the white capes of recall.