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Andaluz
VOL. LXXXIX NO. 2
FOUNDED 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE
andaluz
I : COURT OF THE LIONS : ALHAMBRA
(Granada)
For the monster's simplicity, the menacer's
Way to the center-what but a labyrinth?
The hieratic lions of Alhambra
Circle the court, like a map-maker's rose,
In a poodle-dog's tonsure, ferocious, solicitous,
Their muzzles, bared for the water-spout,
Four times scored with a grimace,
Their manes on their powerless shoulders, like a fleece,
Taking the basin's weight on their trumpery toes,
Among cameras, talismans, Baedekers, legendary
gesso.
Only the lions keep simple.
In the labyrinth's center,
They honor a myth of the instinct's simplicity
With a monster's indifference.
Their savage vocation,
Among pentagrams, figured cartouches, ceremonial
plaster :
To humble the conjuror and mock the enchanter
With the unreflective revelation of the obvious.
The minotaur's rhetoric
And all the apparatus of the maze
Fails on their barbarous haunches
And melts in the runneling marble.
Whatever
Has blazoned the arches with calligrams, pomegran-
ates, eight-pointed stars,
Feathered the mortar
With the peacock's extravangance, surrenders its
sorcery
Here in the lions' enclosure. Here, the invisible ring-
master
That levels the hoop of the fountain's periphery
And lashes a length of cautionary water,
Would have them pigeon-breasted, plaintive, and
apparent.
Yet they speak for a fable's conclusion; they prepare
For the bestial deliverer:
The wands of the Eastern geometer
Are splintered like straws, say the lions. The cult of the
djinn and the scarab,
The construers of entrails, wishing-bone addicts,
compounders
Of formulas, philtres, phylacteries, plain and quadratic
equations,
Bow to the lions.
Here on the portico table,
The kingdom of nuance, the fi ds of inhuman
refinement,
Bend to the fallible animal. Here
The Christian intercessors of our passion,
Armed with an outcry, immediate as a stutter,
Attended by lions, strike through the net and the
trident
And batter the skulls of the Arab.
So say the lions;
While, on their amenable quarters,
The water falls delicate, the enchanter's enigma arises,
Plane over plane and diamond into diamond,
Bossing the surfaces, starring the grain of the panels
With the poet's Kasidah; multiplying columns.
For the place of the beast is bewitched, say the lions:
The channels
Are stained with the blood of a prince's vendetta;
The thread of the fountain descends to Evangelist's
navel
And charms like a hypnotist's prism.
See: even the marble devises
A sleep for the lions. Whatever their vigil,
Poem and magic are joined, in a dream, for a savage's
pleasure:
Alhambra assembles
Its ascending wasp-nest's heaven
Pouched in the plummeting chalks twenty-ways planed
Kasidah: Arabic verse-form incorporated among the geometric and floral
motifs by the Alhambra architects.
To the ceiling's improbable vertex, like a leaven;
Its columns in harvest-clusters, ringed
On the marble's shew-bread; in a Mussulman script
Cursive and flourishing, repeating a violent fable
In the semblance of bow-sprits, wheat-staves, cutlasses,
Humming-bird vibrations.
Il : ALHAMBRA GARDENS : KASIDAH
Blindness at brightness's center: the enchantment
Would have us blind. Else why,
In the Hall of the Sisters, where the loom of the wall
grows intenser
And vision turns, rapt, for its answer,
Does vision surrender its witness, the eyelid repel
What the artist had shaped for the eye?
Why does our vigilance fail
And deliver the magic for touch to interpret, like
Braille?
Deprived, at abundance's center, surely
The lords of complexity guessed at the simple?
Else why, in the maze of a caliph's arcana,
Where flower and fountain are wed to a temple's
example,
Did the gardeners labor so purely
To flatten the cypress and level the plane of the
fountain
For the noon of a concubine's slumber
Or the arm of a floating sultana?
It! : A GRAPE TASTED : MALAGA
The seed seen:
black in the green bloom
like a wick under frost, the oval
flawed where the grosgrain
parts for the twig in a nipple of resin:
--Once, with a cluster,
Faustus practised omnipotence
and summered a prince's vagary-
And in Malaga, now,
how the brine in the sugarlump
hones through the crystal!
How the shape
of a vinous horizon
remembers the Sarazen!
-The pip and the tendril
repeating the star
and the talon-
The mash of the grape
spoke to the tooth, like a language:
First, peach; then
the pomegranate's bitterness, where
the tongue takes the underskin's
tension-imagined a moment-
and gone in a comfit of melons.
IV : A PAINTED FAN : SEVILLE
The fan opens its decimals
twelve ways on a pin
over Euclid's spectrum,
a half-are marking the infinitesimal
bound where the invisible
segments begin.
And from the round
of the under-arc, arises
the hand, as the sticks smile
open, like an eyelash
on its iris,
or a plectrum
on its string.
In the painter's field,
parchment and braid, a shepherdess
stilled in a spangled sierra; lace
on a whalebone pubis,
Mohammedan and motionless, until
an impulse under the fan
displaces the air of Seville
with a python's sound.
V : STREET SONG : MALAGA
(Paseo del Limonar)
The school-girls, with lockets and fans,
wait in the tunneling laurel.
Half-light
has freshened their innocent starches: the stripes
of armorial blouses, peacock-blue on the coifs, cold
tesselations, burnishes, the buttony glitter
of folds on a dreaming pubescence. . .
Mirrors and lions: a hand organ. Water boys.
Trams. The vendors are priming their water-jars,
soaking the wicker.
The school-girls delay in the shadow.
But one,
under petticoats, halters, and linens,
has taken the hand-crank.
Drawn to her toes,
she kindles a tune on the ratchets in a stipple of
hammers
and water-jars: "La Nina de Puerta Oscura."
Her apron explodes.
Diagonals,
slashings, the leap of the harlequin tiger
in a breaking of biasses. Denial
or surfeit has shaken her. There where the braid
has tightened the gourd of her skull, her forehead
is deathly. The phosphor forms, sexual,
in the damp of her hair-line.
A tram and a tram and a tram.
A meeting of flint-stones.