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

Intoxication of final loneliness.

 

                                                                                San Gervasio