As much as you can

And if you can’t shape your life the way you want, at least try as much as you can not to degrade it by too much contact with the world, by too much activity and talk.   Try not to degrade it by dragging it along, taking it around and exposing it so often to the daily sillinessof social events and parties, until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

Come back

Come back often and take hold of me, sensation that I love come back and take hold of me— when the body’s memory awakens and an old longing again moves into the blood, when lips and skin remember and hands feel as though they touch again.   Come back often, take hold of me in the night when lips and skin remember...

Candles

Days to come stand in front of us like a row of lighted candles— golden, warm, and vivid candles.   Days gone by fall behind us, a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles; the nearest are smoking still, cold, melted, and bent.   I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me, and it saddens me to remember their original light. I look ahead at my lighted candles.   I don’t want to turn for fear of seeing, terrified, how quickly that dark line gets longer, how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate.

Voices

Voices, loved and idealized, of those who have died, or of those lost for us like the dead.   Sometimes they speak to us in dreams; sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.   And with their sound for a moment return sounds from our life’s first poetry— like music at night, distant, fading away.

Walls

With no consideration, no pity, no shame, they have built walls around me, thick and high. And now I sit here feeling hopeless. I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind— because I had so much to do outside. When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed! But I never heard the builders, not a sound. Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world. 

Poems

Some of the poems translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard (C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

Longings

Like the beautiful bodies of those who died before they had aged, sadly shut away in a sumptuous mausoleum, roses by the head, jasmine at the feet— so appear the longings that have passed without being satisfied, not one of them granted a night of sensual pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.

Pleasure

My life’s joy and incense: recollection of those hours when I found and captured sensual pleasure as I wanted it. My life’s joy and incense: that I refused all indulgence in routine love affairs.

Ithaca

As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you.   Hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things,