To Sensual Pleasure
My life's joy and incense: recollection of those hours
when I found and captured pleasure as I wanted it.
My life's joy and incense: that I refused
all indulgence in routine love affairs.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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Sensual Pleasures
My life's joy and incense: recollection of those hours
when I found and captured pleasure as I wanted it.
My life's joy and incense: that I refused
all indulgence in routine love affairs.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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I Went
I was not bound. I let myself go completely; went
To those indulgences, half actual,
And half were turned about in my own brain;
Went into the illuminated night;
And drank strong wines, as when
The champions of pleasure drink strong wine.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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When They Come Alive
Try to keep them, poet,
those erotic visions of yours,
however few of them there are that can be stilled.
Put them, half-hidden, in your lines.
Try to hold them, poet,
when they come alive in your mind
at night or in the noonday brightness.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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He vows
Every so often he vows to start a better life.
But when night comes with her own counsels,
with her compromises, and with her promises;
but when night comes with her own power
of the body that wants and demands, he returns,
forlorn, to the same fatal joy.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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In the Same Space
Environment, of house, of city centres, city quarters
Which I look upon and where I walk; years and years.
I have created you in the midst of joy and in the midst of sorrows;
With so many circumstances, with so many things.
And you have been made sensation, the whole of you, for me.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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Longings
Like the beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old,
sadly shut away in sumptuous mausoleum,
roses by the head, jasmine at the feet -
so appear the longings that have passed
without being satisfied, not one of the granted
a single night of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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Addition
I do not question whether I am happy or unhappy.
Yet there is one thing that I keep gladly in mind --
that in the great addition (their addition that I abhor)
that has so many numbers, I am not one
of the many units there. In the final sum
I have not been calculated. And this joy suffices me.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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Return
Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me --
when the memory of the body awakens,
and an old desire runs again through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.
Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember...
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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Interruption
We interrupt the work of the gods,
hasty and inexperienced beings of the moment.
In the palaces of Eleusis and Phthia
Demeter and Thetis start good works
amid high flames and dense smoke. But
always Metaneira rushes from the king's
chambers, disheveled and scared,
and always Peleus is fearful and interferes.
poem by Constantine P. Cavafy
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