:

One from Philippe Jaccottet's first book L'Effraie (Gallimard, 1953)

Interior


A long time I've been trying to live a life here,
in this room I pretend to be fond of,
the table's unthreatening clutter, the window
that opens each dawn onto altered greenery,
a blackbird's heart ticking in the dark ivy,
light-splinters throwing quaint shadows everywhere.   

I make myself believe it's a milder day than most,
I'm at home, and the morning bodes well.
There  is  just  this  spider, at the foot of the bed
(because of the garden), I can't have stamped
on her adequately, she seems busy still
setting her nets to enmesh my frail ghost . . . 

and another:

Portovenere


The sea is dark again. You understand - don't you? -
it's our very last night. But who am I calling?
Beyond my own echo, I'm talking to no-one, to no-one.
Round the tumbled rocks the sea is black,
and tolls in its cloche of rain. A lone bat
bangs off the bars of air in its startled flight,
all our days are equally lost, shredded
by black wings; these waters, their predictable
grandeur, leave me cold, though I'm still here talking,
not to you, not to anything. Let them darken,
these 'fine days'. I'll go, I'll continue to age, who's counting?
The sea knows well enough to shut the door at our back.

 

Changing millennia, two after (quite a long way after) Callimachus:

Argonauta Argo

I was once a prodigious egotistical seashell,
goddess of promontories, and now I'm all yours,
on yours, since Selenea offered me up.

Oh once I was an argonaut, the song goes,
argonauta argo, I was a paper nautilus,
and when there was wind I waved my arms

like little sails, scudding the seas,
so Aristotle thought, wrongly of course,
and Callimachus who might have known better.

When a glassy calm, a calm of glass, prevailed,
and the nereid smiled idly over the ocean,
I rowed lustily with my tentacles,

I lived into my name, until I was finally
beached on a beach at Kea in the Cyclades
and had surely been kakavia

by daybreak were I not old and chewy;
and now, and now, I'm a bauble in your temple,
Arsinoë, I'm an empty envelope,

any message of love I bore an ago ago
cried through and lost, no longer a nest even
for halcyon foundlings (oh I've suffered

immodesties in my time I've seen things).
Look kindly, goddess, on the prayers
of Clinia's daughter, there's a deal of good in her,

- in the way her skirt swings
as she corners the agora -
and she comes from Aeolian Smyrna. 

Where the Girls Are

My mirror-half is lost, my egregious twin,
and all four-handed chores without him
are tedious: folding the sheets, for one.
Could be from sheer ennui he's just gone
down to the foreshore and had done with it;
else he's ensnared in some barely licit
liason. My tart neighbour insinuates
he's snuffling around the jailbait,
the gym, the Sappho Centre, the Eve Bar,
wherever it is the girls are,
being all gentlemanly and helpful
with their duffel-bags. The fat cop whose amble
that is (beat's too sprightly) has promised
to send him home if sighted; the boy's missed.

Silvia won't you help me? We know,
don't we, what he's at, trawling the meat shows
the singles dives, the drive-ins - asking for trouble?
No hanging offence, you'll say, in these parts.
But why scan only the callous hearts?
He's out there, Silvia, looking for your double.

The agora at Cyrene, Callimachus's home town