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Title: The Colossus
Author: Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)
Date of first publication: 1960
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Heinemann, 1960
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 21 July 2016
Date last updated: 21 July 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1341

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

We have corrected the final line of the poem Sculptor from
"A soldier repose than death's" to "A solider repose than death's"






  THE
  COLOSSUS

  *

  POEMS BY

  SYLVIA PLATH



  HEINEMANN

  LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO




  William Heinemann Ltd

  LONDON MELBOURNE TORONTO
  CAPE TOWN AUCKLAND
  THE HAGUE


  First published 1960



  Printed in Great Britain
  by The Windmill Press Ltd
  Kingswood, Surrey




  CONTENTS


  The Manor Garden
  Two Views of a Cadaver Room
  Night Shift
  Sow
  The Eye-mote
  Hardcastle Crags
  Faun
  Departure
  The Colossus
  Lorelei
  Point Shirley
  The Bull of Bendylaw
  All the Dead Dears
  Aftermath
  The Thin People
  Suicide Off Egg Rock
  Mushrooms
  I Want, I Want
  Watercolour of Grantchester Meadows
  The Ghost's Leavetaking
  Metaphors
  Black Rook in Rainy Weather
  A Winter Ship
  Full Fathom Five
  Maudlin
  Blue Moles
  Strumpet Song
  Ouija
  Man in Black
  Snakecharmer
  The Hermit at Outermost House
  The Disquieting Muses
  Medallion
  Two Sisters of Persephone
  The Companionable Ills
  Moonrise
  Spinster
  Frog Autumn
  Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour
  The Beekeeper's Daughter
  The Times are Tidy
  The Burnt-out Spa
  Sculptor
  Poem for a Birthday
    1. Who
    2. Dark House
    3. Maenad
    4. The Beast
    5. Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
    6. Witch Burning
    7. The Stones




  FOR TED




  THE MANOR GARDEN

  The fountains are dry and the roses over.
  License of death.  Your day approaches.
  The pears fatten like little buddhas.
  A blue mist is dragging the lake.

  You move through the era of fishes,
  The smug centuries of the pig--
  Head, toe and finger
  Come clear of the shadow.  History

  Nourishes these broken flutings,
  These crowns of acanthus,
  And the crow settles her garments.
  You inherit white heather, a bee's wing,

  Two suicides, the family wolves,
  Hours of blankness.  Some hard stars
  Already yellow the heavens.
  The spider on its own string

  Crosses the lake.  The worms
  Quit their usual habitations.
  The small birds converge, converge
  With their gifts to a difficult borning.




  TWO VIEWS OF A CADAVER ROOM

  1

  The day she visited the dissecting room
  They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,
  Already half unstrung.  A vinegary fume
  Of the death vats clung to them;
  The white-smocked boys started working.
  The head of his cadaver had caved in,
  And she could scarcely make out anything
  In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.
  A sallow piece of string held it together.

  In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow.
  He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.


  2

  In Brueghel's panorama of smoke and slaughter
  Two people only are blind to the carrion army:
  He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin
  Skirts, sings in the direction
  Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,
  Fingering a leaflet of music, over him,
  Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands
  Of the death's-head shadowing their song.
  These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.

  Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country
  Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner.




  NIGHT SHIFT

  It was not a heart, beating,
  That muted boom, that clangour
  Far off, not blood in the ears
  Drumming up any fever

  To impose on the evening.
  The noise came from the outside:
  A metal detonating
  Native, evidently, to

  These stilled suburbs: nobody
  Startled at it, though the sound
  Shook the ground with its pounding.
  It took root at my coming

  Till the thudding source, exposed,
  Confounded inept guesswork:
  Framed in windows of Main Street's
  Silver factory, immense

  Hammers hoisted, wheels turning,
  Stalled, let fall their vertical
  Tonnage of metal and wood;
  Stunned the marrow.  Men in white

  Undershirts circled, tending
  Without stop those greased machines,
  Tending, without stop, the blunt
  Indefatigable fact.




  SOW

  God knows how our neighbour managed to breed
  His great sow:
  Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

  In the same way
  He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
  Prize ribbon and pig show.

  But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
  Through his lantern-lit
  Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

  To gape at it:
  This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
  With a penny slot

  For thrifty children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,
  About to be
  Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

  In a parsley halo;
  Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
  Mire-smirched, blowzy,

  Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise--
  Bloat tun of milk
  On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

  Shrilling her hulk
  To halt for a swig at the pink teats.  No.  This vast
  Brobdingnag bulk

  Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,
  Fat-rutted eyes
  Dream-filmed.  What a vision of ancient hoghood must

  Thus wholly engross
  The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,
  Helmed, in cuirass,

  Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
  By a grisly-bristled
  Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.

  But our farmer whistled,
  Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,
  And the green-copse-castled

  Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,
  Slowly, grunt
  On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

  A monument
  Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want
  Made lean Lent

  Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,
  Proceeded to swill
  The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.




  THE EYE-MOTE

  Blameless as daylight I stood looking
  At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
  Tails streaming against the green
  Backdrop of sycamores.  Sun was striking
  White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
  Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

  Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
  Away to the left like reeds in a sea
  When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
  Needling it dark.  Then I was seeing
  A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
  Horses warped on the altering green,

  Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
  Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
  Beasts of oasis, a better time.
  Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
  Red cinder around which I myself,
  Horses, planets and spires revolve.

  Neither tears nor the easing flush
  Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
  It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
  I wear the present itch for flesh,
  Blind to what will be and what was.
  I dream that I am Oedipus.

  What I want back is what I was
  Before the bed, before the knife,
  Before the brooch-pin and the salve
  Fixed me in this parenthesis;
  Horses fluent in the wind,
  A place, a time gone out of mind.




  HARDCASTLE CRAGS

  Flintlike, her feet struck
  Such a racket of echoes from the steely street,
  Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black
  Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite
  Its tinder and shake

  A firework of echoes from wall
  To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages.
  But the echoes died at her back as the walls
  Gave way to fields and the incessant seethe of grasses
  Riding in the full

  Of the moon, manes to the wind,
  Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea
  Moves on its root.  Though a mist-wraith wound
  Up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high
  Ahead, it fattened

  To no family-featured ghost,
  Nor did any word body with a name
  The blank mood she walked in.  Once past
  The dream-peopled village, her eyes entertained no dream,
  And the sandman's dust

  Lost lustre under her footsoles.
  The long wind, paring her person down
  To a pinch of flame, blew its burdened whistle
  In the whorl of her ear, and like a scooped-out pumpkin crown
  Her head cupped the babel.

  All the night gave her, in return
  For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat
  Of her heart was the humped indifferent iron
  Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set
  On black stone.  Barns

  Guarded broods and litters
  Behind shut doors; the dairy herds
  Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders;
  Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool, and birds,
  Twig-sleeping, wore

  Granite ruffs, their shadows
  The guise of leaves.  The whole landscape
  Loomed absolute as the antique world was
  Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap,
  Unaltered by eyes,

  Enough to snuff the quick
  Of her small heat out, but before the weight
  Of stones and hills of stones could break
  Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light
  She turned back.




  FAUN

  Haunched like a faun, he hooed
  From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost
  Until all owls in the twigged forest
  Flapped black to look and brood
  On the call this man made.

  No sound but a drunken coot
  Lurching home along river bank.
  Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank
  Of double star-eyes lit
  Boughs where those owls sat.

  An arena of yellow eyes
  Watched the changing shape he cut,
  Saw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout
  Goat-horns.  Marked how god rose
  And galloped woodward in that guise.




  DEPARTURE

  The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green;
  Green, also, the grapes on the green vine
  Shading the brickred porch tiles.
  The money's run out.

  How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters.
  Ungifted, ungrieved, our leavetaking.
  The sun shines on unripe corn.
  Cats play in the stalks.

  Retrospect shall not soften such penury--
  Sun's brass, the moon's steely patinas,
  The leaden slag of the world--
  But always expose

  The scraggy rock spit shielding the town's blue bay
  Against which the brunt of outer sea
  Beats, is brutal endlessly.
  Gull-fouled, a stone hut

  Bares its low lintel to corroding weathers:
  Across that jut of ochreous rock
  Goats shamble, morose, rank-haired,
  To lick the sea-salt.




  THE COLOSSUS

  I shall never get you put together entirely,
  Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
  Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
  Proceed from your great lips.
  It's worse than a barnyard.

  Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
  Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
  Thirty years now I have laboured
  To dredge the silt from your throat.
  I am none the wiser.

  Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol
  I crawl like an ant in mourning
  Over the weedy acres of your brow
  To mend the immense skull-plates and clear
  The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

  A blue sky out of the Oresteia
  Arches above us.  O father, all by yourself
  You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
  I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
  Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

  In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
  It would take more than a lightning-stroke
  To create such a ruin.
  Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
  Of your left ear, out of the wind,

  Counting the red stars and those of plum-colour.
  The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
  My hours are married to shadow.
  No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
  On the blank stones of the landing.




  LORELEI

  It is no night to drown in:
  A full moon, river lapsing
  Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,

  The blue water-mists dropping
  Scrim after scrim like fishnets
  Though fishermen are sleeping,

  The massive castle turrets
  Doubling themselves in a glass
  All stillness.  Yet these shapes float

  Up toward me, troubling the face
  Of quiet.  From the nadir
  They rise, their limbs ponderous

  With richness, hair heavier
  Than sculpted marble.  They sing
  Of a world more full and clear

  Than can be.  Sisters, your song
  Bears a burden too weighty
  For the whorled ear's listening

  Here, in a well-steered country,
  Under a balanced ruler.
  Deranging by harmony

  Beyond the mundane order,
  Your voices lay siege.  You lodge
  On the pitched reefs of nightmare,

  Promising sure harbourage;
  By day, descant from borders
  Of hebetude, from the ledge

  Also of high windows.  Worse
  Even than your maddening
  Song, your silence.  At the source

  Of your ice-hearted calling--
  Drunkenness of the great depths.
  O river, I see drifting

  Deep in your flux of silver
  Those great goddesses of peace.
  Stone, stone, ferry me down there.




  POINT SHIRLEY

  From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison
  The shingle booms, bickering under
  The sea's collapse.
  Snowcakes break and welter.  This year
  The gritted wave leaps
  The seawall and drops onto a bier
  Of quahog chips,
  Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten

  In my grandmother's sand yard.  She is dead,
  Whose laundry snapped and froze here, who
  Kept house against
  What the sluttish, rutted sea could do.
  Squall waves once danced
  Ship timbers in through the cellar window;
  A thresh-tailed, lanced
  Shark littered in the geranium bed--

  Such collusion of mulish elements
  She wore her broom straws to the nub.
  Twenty years out
  Of her hand, the house still hugs in each drab
  Stucco socket
  The purple egg-stones: from Great Head's knob
  To the filled-in Gut
  The sea in its cold gizzard ground those rounds.

  Nobody wintering now behind
  The planked-up windows where she set
  Her wheat loaves
  And apple cakes to cool.  What is it
  Survives, grieves
  So, over this battered, obstinate spit
  Of gravel?  The waves'
  Spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,

  Grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.
  A labour of love, and that labour lost.
  Steadily the sea
  Eats at Point Shirley.  She died blessed,
  And I come by
  Bones, bones only, pawed and tossed,
  A dog-faced sea.
  The sun sinks under Boston, bloody red.

  I would get from these dry-papped stones
  The milk your love instilled in them.
  The black ducks dive.
  And though your graciousness might stream,
  And I contrive,
  Grandmother, stones are nothing of home
  To that spumiest dove.
  Against both bar and tower the black sea runs.




  THE BULL OF BENDYLAW

  The black bull bellowed before the sea.
  The sea, till that day orderly,
  Hove up against Bendylaw.

  The queen in the mulberry arbour stared
  Stiff as a queen on a playing card.
  The king fingered his beard.

  A blue sea, four horny bull-feet,
  A bull-snouted sea that wouldn't stay put,
  Bucked at the garden gate.

  Along box-lined walks in the florid sun
  Toward the rowdy bellow and back again
  The lords and ladies ran.

  The great bronze gate began to crack,
  The sea broke in at every crack,
  Pellmell, blueblack.

  The bull surged up, the bull surged down,
  Not to be stayed by a daisy chain
  Nor by any learned man.

  O the king's tidy acre is under the sea,
  And the royal rose in the bull's belly,
  And the bull on the king's highway.




  ALL THE DEAD DEARS

  _In the Archaeological Museum in Cambridge is a
  stone coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing the
  skeletons of a woman, a mouse and a shrew.  The
  ankle-bone of the woman has been slightly gnawn._

  Rigged poker-stiff on her back
  With a granite grin
  This antique museum-cased lady
  Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
  Relics of a mouse and a shrew
  That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

  These three, unmasked now, bear
  Dry witness
  To the gross eating game
  We'd wink at if we didn't hear
  Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,
  Our own grist down to its bony face.

  How they grip us through thin and thick,
  These barnacle dead!
  This lady here's no kin
  Of mine, yet kin she is: she'll suck
  Blood and whistle my marrow clean
  To prove it.  As I think now of her head,

  From the mercury-backed glass
  Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother
  Reach hag hands to haul me in,
  And an image looms under the fishpond surface
  Where the daft father went down
  With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair--

  All the long gone darlings: they
  Get back, though, soon,
  Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,
  Childbirths or a family barbecue:
  Any touch, taste, tang's
  Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,

  And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair
  Between rick
  And tack of the clock, until we go,
  Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver
  Riddled with ghosts, to lie
  Deadlocked with them, taking root as cradles rock.




  AFTERMATH

  Compelled by calamity's magnet
  They loiter and stare as if the house
  Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
  Some scandal might any minute ooze
  From a smoke-choked closet into light;
  No deaths, no prodigious injuries
  Glut these hunters after an old meat,
  Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

  Mother Medea in a green smock
  Moves humbly as any housewife through
  Her ruined apartments, taking stock
  Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:
  Cheated of the pyre and the rack,
  The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.




  THE THIN PEOPLE

  They are always with us, the thin people
  Meagre of dimension as the grey people

  On a movie-screen.  They
  Are unreal, we say:

  It was only in a movie, it was only
  In a war making evil headlines when we

  Were small that they famished and
  Grew so lean and would not round

  Out their stalky limbs again though peace
  Plumped the bellies of the mice

  Under the meanest table.
  It was during the long hunger-battle

  They found their talent to persevere
  In thinness, to come, later,

  Into our bad dreams, their menace
  Not guns, not abuses,

  But a thin silence.
  Wrapped in flea-ridden donkey skins,

  Empty of complaint, forever
  Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore

  The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn
  Scapegoat.  But so thin,

  So weedy a race could not remain in dreams,
  Could not remain outlandish victims

  In the contracted country of the head
  Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

  Keep from cutting fat meat
  Out of the side of the generous moon when it

  Set foot nightly in her yard
  Until her knife had pared

  The moon to a rind of little light.
  Now the thin people do not obliterate

  Themselves as the dawn
  Greyness blues, reddens, and the outline

  Of the world comes clear and fills with colour.
  They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper

  Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales
  Under their thin-lipped smiles,

  Their withering kingship.
  How they prop each other up!

  We own no wildernesses rich and deep enough
  For stronghold against their stiff

  Battalions.  See, how the tree boles flatten
  And lose their good browns

  If the thin people simply stand in the forest,
  Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest

  And greyer; not even moving their bones.




  SUICIDE OFF EGG ROCK

  Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
  On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
  Gas tanks, factory stacks--that landscape
  Of imperfections his bowels were part of--
  Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
  Sun struck the water like a damnation.
  No pit of shadow to crawl into,
  And his blood beating the old tattoo
  I am, I am, I am.  Children
  Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift
  Ravelled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.
  A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
  Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.

  He smouldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,
  His body beached with the sea's garbage,
  A machine to breathe and beat forever.
  Flies filing in through a dead skate's eyehole
  Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.
  The words in his book wormed off the pages.
  Everything glittered like blank paper.

  Everything shrank in the sun's corrosive
  Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
  He heard when he walked into the water

  The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.




  MUSHROOMS

  Overnight, very
  Whitely, discreetly,
  Very quietly

  Our toes, our noses
  Take hold on the loam,
  Acquire the air.

  Nobody sees us,
  Stops us, betrays us;
  The small grains make room.

  Soft fists insist on
  Heaving the needles,
  The leafy bedding,

  Even the paving.
  Our hammers, our rams,
  Earless and eyeless,

  Perfectly voiceless,
  Widen the crannies,
  Shoulder through holes.  We

  Diet on water,
  On crumbs of shadow,
  Bland-mannered, asking

  Little or nothing.
  So many of us!
  So many of us!

  We are shelves, we are
  Tables, we are meek,
  We are edible,

  Nudgers and shovers
  In spite of ourselves.
  Our kind multiplies:

  We shall by morning
  Inherit the earth.
  Our foot's in the door.




  I WANT, I WANT

  Open-mouthed, the baby god
  Immense, bald, though baby-headed,
  Cried out for the mother's dug.
  The dry volcanoes cracked and spit,

  Sand abraded the milkless lip.
  Cried then for the father's blood
  Who set wasp, wolf and shark to work,
  Engineered the gannet's beak.

  Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch
  Raised his men of skin and bone,
  Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,
  Thorns on the bloody rose-stem.




  WATERCOLOUR OF GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS

  There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold.  In air
  Stilled, silvered as water in a glass
  Nothing is big or far.
  The small shrew chitters from its wilderness
  Of grassheads and is heard.
  Each thumb-size bird
  Flits nimble-winged in thickets, and of good colour.

  Cloudrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over
  The bland Granta double their white and green
  World under the sheer water
  And ride that flux at anchor, upside down.
  The punter sinks his pole.
  In Byron's pool
  Cat-tails part where the tame cygnets steer.

  It is a country on a nursery plate.
  Spotted cows revolve their jaws and crop
  Red clover or gnaw beetroot
  Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup.
  Hedging meadows of benign
  Arcadian green
  The blood-berried hawthorn hides its spines with white.

  Droll, vegetarian, the water rat
  Saws down a reed and swims from his limber grove,
  While the students stroll or sit,
  Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love--
  Black-gowned, but unaware
  How in such mild air
  The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.




  THE GHOST'S LEAVETAKING

  Enter the chilly no-man's land of about
  Five o'clock in the morning, the no-colour void
  Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot
  Of sulphurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums
  Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much,

  Gets ready to face the ready-made creation
  Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets.
  This is the kingdom of the fading apparition,
  The oracular ghost who dwindles on pin-legs
  To a knot of laundry, with a classic bunch of sheets

  Upraised, as a hand, emblematic of farewell.
  At this joint between two worlds and two entirely
  Incompatible modes of time, the raw material
  Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus
  Of ambrosial revelation.  And so departs.

  Chair and bureau are the hieroglyphs
  Of some godly utterance wakened heads ignore:
  So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing,
  Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld,
  A world we lose by merely waking up.

  Trailing its telltale tatters only at the outermost
  Fringe of mundane vision, this ghost goes
  Hand aloft, goodbye, goodbye, not down
  Into the rocky gizzard of the earth,
  But toward a region where our thick atmosphere

  Diminishes, and God knows what is there.
  A point of exclamation marks that sky
  In ringing orange like a stellar carrot.
  Its round period, displaced and green,
  Suspends beside it the first point, the starting

  Point of Eden, next the new moon's curve.
  Go, ghost of our mother and father, ghost of us,
  And ghost of our dreams' children, in those sheets
  Which signify our origin and end,
  To the cloud-cuckoo land of colour wheels

  And pristine alphabets and cows that moo
  And moo as they jump over moons as new
  As that crisp cusp toward which you voyage now.
  Hail and farewell.  Hello, goodbye.  O keeper
  Of the profane grail, the dreaming skull.




  METAPHORS

  I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
  An elephant, a ponderous house,
  A melon strolling on two tendrils.
  O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
  This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
  Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
  I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
  I've eaten a bag of green apples,
  Boarded the train there's no getting off.




  BLACK ROOK IN RAINY WEATHER

  On the stiff twig up there
  Hunches a wet black rook
  Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
  I do not expect miracle
  Or an accident

  To set the sight on fire
  In my eye, nor seek
  Any more in the desultory weather some design,
  But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
  Without ceremony, or portent.

  Although, I admit, I desire,
  Occasionally, some backtalk
  From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
  A certain minor light may still
  Leap incandescent

  Out of kitchen table or chair
  As if a celestial burning took
  Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then--
  Thus hallowing an interval
  Otherwise inconsequent

  By bestowing largesse, honour,
  One might say love.  At any rate, I now walk
  Wary (for it could happen
  Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
  Yet politic; ignorant

  Of whatever angel may choose to flare
  Suddenly at my elbow.  I only know that a rook
  Ordering its black feathers can so shine
  As to seize my senses, haul
  My eyelids up, and grant

  A brief respite from fear
  Of total neutrality.  With luck,
  Trekking stubborn through this season
  Of fatigue, I shall
  Patch together a content

  Of sorts.  Miracles occur,
  If you care to call those spasmodic
  Tricks of radiance miracles.  The wait's begun again,
  The long wait for the angel,
  For that rare, random descent.




  A WINTER SHIP

  At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of.
  Red and orange barges list and blister
  Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy,
  And apparently indestructible.
  The sea pulses under a skin of oil.

  A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole,
  Riding the tide of the wind, steady
  As wood and formal, in a jacket of ashes,
  The whole flat harbour anchored in
  The round of his yellow eye-button.

  A blimp swims up like a day-moon or tin
  Cigar over his rink of fishes.
  The prospect is dull as an old etching.
  They are unloading three barrels of little crabs.
  The pier pilings seem about to collapse

  And with them that rickety edifice
  Of warehouses, derricks, smokestacks and bridges
  In the distance.  All around us the water slips
  And gossips in its loose vernacular,
  Ferrying the smells of dead cod and tar.

  Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes--
  A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers.
  Even our shadows are blue with cold.
  We wanted to see the sun come up
  And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,

  Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost,
  Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay
  Encased in a glassy pellicle.
  The sun will diminish it soon enough:
  Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.




  FULL FATHOM FIVE

  Old man, you surface seldom.
  Then you come in with the tide's coming
  When seas wash cold, foam-

  Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
  A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
  Crest and trough.  Miles long

  Extend the radial sheaves
  Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
  Knotted, caught, survives

  The old myth of origins
  Unimaginable.  You float near
  As keeled ice-mountains

  Of the north, to be steered clear
  Of, not fathomed.  All obscurity
  Starts with a danger:

  Your dangers are many.  I
  Cannot look much but your form suffers
  Some strange injury

  And seems to die: so vapours
  Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
  The muddy rumours

  Of your burial move me
  To half-believe: your reappearance
  Proves rumours shallow,

  For the archaic trenched lines
  Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
  Ages beat like rains

  On the unbeaten channels
  Of the ocean.  Such sage humour and
  Durance are whirlpools

  To make away with the ground-
  Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole.
  Waist down, you may wind

  One labyrinthine tangle
  To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
  Skulls.  Inscrutable,

  Below shoulders not once
  Seen by any man who kept his head,
  You defy questions;

  You defy other godhood.
  I walk dry on your kingdom's border
  Exiled to no good.

  Your shelled bed I remember.
  Father, this thick air is murderous.
  I would breathe water.




  MAUDLIN

  Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag
  In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin
  Gibbets with her curse the moon's man,
  Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg:

  Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig
  He kings it, navel-knit to no groan,
  But at the price of a pin-stitched skin
  Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.




  BLUE MOLES

  1

  They're out of the dark's ragbag, these two
  Moles dead in the pebbled rut,
  Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart--
  Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.
  One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,
  Little victim unearthed by some large creature
  From his orbit under the elm root.
  The second carcase makes a duel of the affair:
  Blind twins bitten by bad nature.

  The sky's far dome is sane and clear.
  Leaves, undoing their yellow caves
  Between the road and the lake water,
  Bare no sinister spaces.  Already
  The moles look neutral as the stones.
  Their corkscrew noses, their white hands
  Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.
  Difficult to imagine how fury struck--
  Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.


  2

  Nightly the battle-shouts start up
  In the ear of the veteran, and again
  I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
  Light's death to them: they shrivel in it.
  They move through their mute rooms while I sleep,
  Palming the earth aside, grubbers
  After the fat children of root and rock.
  By day, only the topsoil heaves.
  Down there one is alone.

  Outsize hands prepare a path,
  They go before: opening the veins,
  Delving for the appendages
  Of beetles, sweetbreads, shards--to be eaten
  Over and over.  And still the heaven
  Of final surfeit is just as far
  From the door as ever.  What happens between us
  Happens in darkness, vanishes
  Easy and often as each breath.




  STRUMPET SONG

  With white frost gone
  And all green dreams not worth much,
  After a lean day's work
  Time comes round for that foul slut:
  Mere bruit of her takes our street
  Until every man,
  Red, pale or dark,
  Veers to her slouch.

  Mark, I cry, that mouth
  Made to do violence on,
  That seamed face
  Askew with blotch, dint, scar
  Struck by each dour year.
  Walks there not some such one man
  As can spare breath
  To patch with brand of love this rank grimace
  Which out from black tarn, ditch and cup
  Into my most chaste own eyes
  Looks up.




  OUIJA

  It is a chilly god, a god of shades,
  Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.
  At the window, those unborn, those undone
  Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,
  An envious phosphorescence in their wings.
  Vermilions, bronzes, colours of the sun
  In the coal fire will not wholly console them.
  Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark
  For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim.
  The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.
  The old god dribbles, in return, his words.

  The old god, too, writes aureate poetry
  In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,
  Fair chronicler of every foul declension.
  Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled
  His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper
  When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
  And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
  Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
  Ravel above us, mistily descend,
  Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.

  He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair
  Who has saltier aphrodisiacs
  Than virgins' tears.  That bawdy queen of death,
  Her wormy couriers are at his bones.
  Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.
  I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe
  What flinty pebbles the ploughblade upturns
  As ponderable tokens of her love.
  He, godly, doddering, spells
  No succinct Gabriel from the letters here
  But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.




  MAN IN BLACK

  Where the three magenta
  Breakwaters take the shove
  And suck of the grey sea

  To the left, and the wave
  Unfists against the dun
  Barb-wired headland of

  The Deer Island prison
  With its trim piggeries,
  Hen huts and cattle green

  To the right, and March ice
  Glazes the rock pools yet,
  Snuff-coloured sand cliffs rise

  Over a great stone spit
  Bared by each falling tide,
  And you, across those white

  Stones, strode out in your dead
  Black coat, black shoes, and your
  Black hair till there you stood,

  Fixed vortex on the far
  Tip, riveting stones, air,
  All of it, together.




  SNAKECHARMER

  As the gods began one world, and man another,
  So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere
  With moon-eye, mouth-pipe.  He pipes.  Pipes green.  Pipes water.

  Pipes water green until green waters waver
  With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.
  And as his notes twine green, the green river

  Shapes its images around his songs.
  He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
  No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues

  Supports his foot.  He pipes a world of snakes,
  Of sways and ceilings, from the snake-rooted bottom
  Of his mind.  And now nothing but snakes

  Is visible.  The snake-scales have become
  Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast
  Of tree and human.  And he within this snakedom

  Rides the writhings which make manifest
  His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes
  From his thin pipe.  Out of this green nest

  As out of Eden's navel twist the lines
  Of snaky generations: let there be snakes!
  And snakes there were, are, will be--till yawns

  Consume this piper and he tires of music
  And pipes the world back to the simple fabric
  Of snake-warp, snake-weft.  Pipes the cloth of snakes

  To a melting of green waters, till no snake
  Shows its head, and those green waters back to
  Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.
  Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.




  THE HERMIT AT OUTERMOST HOUSE

  Sky and sea, horizon-hinged
  Tablets of blank blue, couldn't,
  Clapped shut, flatten this man out.

  The great gods, Stone-Head, Claw-Foot,
  Winded by much rock-bumping
  And claw-threat, realised that.

  For what, then, had they endured
  Dourly the long hots and colds,
  Those old despots, if he sat

  Laugh-shaken on his doorsill,
  Backbone unbendable as
  Timbers of his upright hut?

  Hard gods were there, nothing else.
  Still he thumbed out something else.
  Thumbed no stony, horny pot,

  But a certain meaning green.
  He withstood them, that hermit.
  Rock-face, crab-claw verged on green.

  Gulls mulled in the greenest light.




  THE DISQUIETING MUSES

  Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
  Or what disfigured and unsightly
  Cousin did you so unwisely keep
  Unasked to my christening, that she
  Sent these ladies in her stead
  With heads like darning-eggs to nod
  And nod and nod at foot and head
  And at the left side of my crib?

  Mother, who made to order stories
  Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
  Mother, whose witches always, always
  Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
  Whether you saw them, whether you said
  Words to rid me of those three ladies
  Nodding by night around my bed,
  Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.

  In the hurricane, when father's twelve
  Study windows bellied in
  Like bubbles about to break, you fed
  My brother and me cookies and ovaltine
  And helped the two of us to choir:
  'Thor is angry: boom boom boom!
  Thor is angry: we don't care!'
  But those ladies broke the panes.

  When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
  Blinking flashlights like fireflies
  And singing the glowworm song, I could
  Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
  But, heavy-footed, stood aside
  In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
  Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
  And the shadow stretched, the lights went out.

  Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
  And praised my arabesques and trills
  Although each teacher found my touch
  Oddly wooden in spite of scales
  And the hours of practising, my ear
  Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
  I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
  From muses unhired by you, dear mother.

  I woke one day to see you, mother,
  Floating above me in bluest air
  On a green balloon bright with a million
  Flowers and bluebirds that never were
  Never, never, found anywhere.
  But the little planet bobbed away
  Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!
  And I faced my travelling companions.

  Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
  They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
  Faces blank as the day I was born,
  Their shadows long in the setting sun
  That never brightens or goes down.
  And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
  Mother, mother.  But no frown of mine
  Will betray the company I keep.




  MEDALLION

  By the gate with star and moon
  Worked into the peeled orange wood
  The bronze snake lay in the sun

  Inert as a shoelace; dead
  But pliable still, his jaw
  Unhinged and his grin crooked,

  Tongue a rose-coloured arrow.
  Over my hand I hung him.
  His little vermilion eye

  Ignited with a glassed flame
  As I turned him in the light;
  When I split a rock one time

  The garnet bits burned like that.
  Dust dulled his back to ochre
  The way sun ruins a trout.

  Yet his belly kept its fire
  Going under the chainmail,
  The old jewels smouldering there

  In each opaque belly-scale:
  Sunset looked at through milk glass.
  And I saw white maggots coil

  Thin as pins in the dark bruise
  Where his innards bulged as if
  He were digesting a mouse.

  Knifelike, he was chaste enough,
  Pure death's-metal.  The yardman's
  Flung brick perfected his laugh.




  TWO SISTERS OF PERSEPHONE

  Two girls there are: within the house
  One sits; the other, without.
  Daylong a duet of shade and light
  Plays between these.

  In her dark wainscotted room
  The first works problems on
  A mathematical machine.
  Dry ticks mark time

  As she calculates each sum.
  At this barren enterprise
  Rat-shrewd go her squint eyes,
  Root-pale her meagre frame.

  Bronzed as earth, the second lies,
  Hearing ticks blown gold
  Like pollen on bright air.  Lulled
  Near a bed of poppies,

  She sees how their red silk flare
  Of petalled blood
  Burns open to sun's blade.
  On that green altar

  Freely become sun's bride, the latter
  Grows quick with seed.
  Grass-couched in her labour's pride,
  She bears a king.  Turned bitter

  And sallow as any lemon,
  The other, wry virgin to the last,
  Goes graveward with flesh laid waste,
  Worm-husbanded, yet no woman.




  THE COMPANIONABLE ILLS

  The nose-end that twitches, the old imperfections--
  Tolerable now as moles on the face
  Put up with until chagrin gives place
  To a wry complaisance--

  Dug in first as God's spurs
  To start the spirit out of the mud
  It stabled in; long-used, became well-loved
  Bedfellows of the spirit's debauch, fond masters.




  MOONRISE

  Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves.
  I'll go out and sit in white like they do,
  Doing nothing.  July's juice rounds their nubs.

  This park is fleshed with idiot petals.
  White catalpa flowers tower, topple,
  Cast a round white shadow in their dying.

  A pigeon rudders down.  Its fan-tail's white.
  Vocation enough: opening, shutting
  White petals, white fan-tails, ten white fingers.

  Enough for fingernails to make half-moons
  Redden in white palms no labour reddens.
  White bruises toward colour, else collapses.

  Berries redden.  A body of whiteness
  Rots, and smells of rot under its headstone
  Though the body walk out in clean linen.

  I smell that whiteness here, beneath the stones
  Where small ants roll their eggs, where grubs fatten.
  Death may whiten in sun or out of it.

  Death whitens in the egg and out of it.
  I can see no colour for this whiteness.
  White: it is a complexion of the mind.

  I tire, imagining white Niagaras
  Build up from a rock root, as fountains build
  Against the weighty image of their fall.

  Lucina, bony mother, labouring
  Among the socketed white stars, your face
  Of candour pares white flesh to the white bone,

  Who drag our ancient father at the heel,
  White-bearded, weary.  The berries purple
  And bleed.  The white stomach may ripen yet.




  SPINSTER

  Now this particular girl
  During a ceremonious April walk
  With her latest suitor
  Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
  By the birds' irregular babel
  And the leaves' litter.

  By this tumult afflicted, she
  Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air,
  His gait stray uneven
  Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.
  She judged petals in disarray,
  The whole season, sloven.

  How she longed for winter then!--
  Scrupulously austere in its order
  Of white and black
  Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,
  And heart's frosty discipline
  Exact as a snowflake.

  But here--a burgeoning
  Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
  Into vulgar motley--
  A treason not to be borne.  Let idiots
  Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
  She withdrew neatly.

  And round her house she set
  Such a barricade of barb and check
  Against mutinous weather
  As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
  With curse, fist, threat
  Or love, either.




  FROG AUTUMN

  Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
  The insects are scant, skinny.
  In these palustral homes we only
  Croak and wither.

  Mornings dissipate in somnolence.
  The sun brightens tardily
  Among the pithless reeds.  Flies fail us.
  The fen sickens.

  Frost drops even the spider.  Clearly
  The genius of plenitude
  Houses himself elsewhere.  Our folk thin
  Lamentably.




  MUSSEL HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOUR

  I came before the water-
  Colourists came to get the
  Good of the Cape light that scours
  Sand grit to sided crystal
  And buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls
  Of the three fishing smacks beached
  On the bank of the river's

  Backtracking tail.  I'd come for
  Free fish-bait: the blue mussels
  Clumped like bulbs at the grass-root
  Margin of the tidal pools.
  Dawn tide stood dead low.  I smelt
  Mud stench, shell guts, gulls' leavings;
  Heard a queer crusty scrabble

  Cease, and I neared the silenced
  Edge of a cratered pool-bed.
  The mussels hung dull blue and
  Conspicuous, yet it seemed
  A sly world's hinges had swung
  Shut against me.  All held still.
  Though I counted scant seconds,

  Enough ages lapsed to win
  Confidence of safe-conduct
  In the wary otherworld
  Eyeing me.  Grass put forth claws;
  Small mud knobs, nudged from under,
  Displaced their domes as tiny
  Knights might doff their casques.  The crabs

  Inched from their pygmy burrows
  And from the trench-dug mud, all
  Camouflaged in mottled mail
  Of browns and greens.  Each wore one
  Claw swollen to a shield large
  As itself--no fiddler's arm
  Grown Gargantuan by trade,

  But grown grimly, and grimly
  Borne, for a use beyond my
  Guessing of it.  Sibilant
  Mass-motived hordes, they sidled
  Out in a converging stream
  Toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to
  Meet the thin and sluggish thread

  Of sea retracing its tide-
  Way up the river-basin.
  Or to avoid me.  They moved
  Obliquely with a dry-wet
  Sound, with a glittery wisp
  And trickle.  Could they feel mud
  Pleasurable under claws

  As I could between bare toes?
  That question ended it--I
  Stood shut out, for once, for all,
  Puzzling the passage of their
  Absolutely alien
  Order as I might puzzle
  At the clear tail of Halley's

  Comet coolly giving my
  Orbit the go-by, made known
  By a family name it
  Knew nothing of.  So the crabs
  Went about their business, which
  Wasn't fiddling, and I filled
  A big handkerchief with blue

  Mussels.  From what the crabs saw,
  If they could see, I was one
  Two-legged mussel-picker.
  High on the air thatching
  Of the dense grasses I found
  The husk of a fiddler-crab,
  Intact, strangely strayed above

  His world of mud--green colour
  And innards bleached and blown off
  Somewhere by much sun and wind;
  There was no telling if he'd
  Died recluse or suicide
  Or headstrong Columbus crab.
  The crab-face, etched and set there,

  Grimaced as skulls grimace: it
  Had an Oriental look,
  A samurai death mask done
  On a tiger tooth, less for
  Art's sake than God's.  Far from sea--
  Where red-freckled crab-backs, claws
  And whole crabs, dead, their soggy

  Bellies pallid and upturned,
  Perform their shambling waltzes
  On the waves' dissolving turn
  And return, losing themselves
  Bit by bit to their friendly
  Element--this relic saved
  Face, to face the bald-faced sun.




  THE BEEKEEPER'S DAUGHTER

  A garden of mouthings.  Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
  The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
  Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
  A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
  Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
  You move among the many-breasted hives,

  My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

  Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
  The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
  In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
  The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
  To father dynasties.  The air is rich.
  Here is a queenship no mother can contest--

  A fruit that's death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

  In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
  Keep house among the grasses.  Kneeling down
  I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
  Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
  Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
  Under the coronal of sugar roses

  The queen bee marries the winter of your year.




  THE TIMES ARE TIDY

  Unlucky the hero born
  In this province of the stuck record
  Where the most watchful cooks go jobless
  And the mayor's rotisserie turns
  Round of its own accord.

  There's no career in the venture
  Of riding against the lizard,
  Himself withered these latter-days
  To leaf-size from lack of action:
  History's beaten the hazard.

  The last crone got burnt up
  More than eight decades back
  With the love-hot herb, the talking cat,
  But the children are better for it,
  The cow milk's cream an inch thick.




  THE BURNT-OUT SPA

  An old beast ended in this place:

  A monster of wood and rusty teeth.
  Fire smelted his eyes to lumps
  Of pale blue vitreous stuff, opaque
  As resin drops oozed from pine bark.

  The rafters and struts of his body wear
  Their char of karakul still.  I can't tell
  How long his carcase has foundered under
  The rubbish of summers, the black-leaved falls.

  Now little weeds insinuate
  Soft suede tongues between his bones.
  His armourplate, his toppled stones
  Are an esplanade for crickets.

  I pick and pry like a doctor or
  Archaeologist among
  Iron entrails, enamel bowls,
  The coils and pipes that made him run.

  The small dell eats what ate it once.
  And yet the ichor of the spring
  Proceeds clear as it ever did
  From the broken throat, the marshy lip.

  It flows off below the green and white
  Balustrade of a sag-backed bridge.
  Leaning over, I encounter one
  Blue and improbable person

  Framed in a basketwork of cat-tails.
  O she is gracious and austere,
  Seated beneath the toneless water!
  It is not I, it is not I.

  No animal spoils on her green doorstep.
  And we shall never enter there
  Where the durable ones keep house.
  The stream that hustles us

  Neither nourishes nor heals.




  SCULPTOR

  _For Leonard Baskin_

  To his house the bodiless
  Come to barter endlessly
  Vision, wisdom, for bodies
  Palpable as his, and weighty.

  Hands moving move priestlier
  Than priest's hands, invoke no vain
  Images of light and air
  But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone.

  Obdurate, in dense-grained wood,
  A bald angel blocks and shapes
  The flimsy light; arms folded
  Watches his cumbrous world eclipse

  Inane worlds of wind and cloud.
  Bronze dead dominate the floor,
  Resistive, ruddy-bodied,
  Dwarfing us.  Our bodies flicker

  Toward extinction in those eyes
  Which, without him, were beggared
  Of place, time, and their bodies.
  Emulous spirits make discord,

  Try entry, enter nightmares
  Until his chisel bequeaths
  Them life livelier than ours,
  A solider repose than death's.




  POEM FOR A BIRTHDAY

  1.  _Who_

  The month of flowering's finished.  The fruit's in,
  Eaten or rotten.  I am all mouth.
  October's the month for storage.

  This shed's fusty as a mummy's stomach:
  Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.
  I am at home here among the dead heads.

  Let me sit in a flowerpot,
  The spiders won't notice.
  My heart is a stopped geranium.

  If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.
  Dogbody noses the petals.  They bloom upside down.
  They rattle like hydrangea bushes.

  Mouldering heads console me,
  Nailed to the rafters yesterday:
  Inmates who don't hibernate.

  Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze,
  A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted,
  Their veins white as porkfat.

  O the beauty of usage!
  The orange pumpkins have no eyes.
  These halls are full of women who think they are birds.

  This is a dull school.
  I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet,
  Without dreams of any sort.

  Mother, you are the one mouth
  I would be a tongue to.  Mother of otherness
  Eat me.  Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.

  I said: I must remember this, being small.
  There were such enormous flowers,
  Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.

  The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry.
  Now they light me up like an electric bulb.
  For weeks I can remember nothing at all.



  2.  _Dark House_

  This is a dark house, very big.
  I made it myself,
  Cell by cell from a quiet corner,
  Chewing at the grey paper,
  Oozing the glue drops,
  Whistling, wiggling my ears,
  Thinking of something else.

  It has so many cellars,
  Such eelish delvings!
  I am round as an owl,
  I see by my own light.
  Any day I may litter puppies
  Or mother a horse.  My belly moves.
  I must make more maps.

  These marrowy tunnels!
  Moley-handed, I eat my way.
  All-mouth licks up the bushes
  And the pots of meat.
  He lives in an old well,
  A stony hole.  He's to blame.
  He's a fat sort.

  Pebble smells, turnipy chambers.
  Small nostrils are breathing.
  Little humble loves!
  Footlings, boneless as noses,
  It is warm and tolerable
  In the bowel of the root.
  Here's a cuddly mother.



  3.  _Maenad_

  Once I was ordinary:
  Sat by my father's bean tree
  Eating the fingers of wisdom.
  The birds made milk.
  When it thundered I hid under a flat stone.

  The mother of mouths didn't love me.
  The old man shrank to a doll.
  O I am too big to go backward:
  Birdmilk is feathers,
  The bean leaves are dumb as hands.

  This month is fit for little.
  The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.
  A red tongue is among us.
  Mother, keep out of my barnyard,
  I am becoming another.

  Dog-head, devourer:
  Feed me the berries of dark.
  The lids won't shut.  Time
  Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun
  Its endless glitter.

  I must swallow it all.

  Lady, who are these others in the moon's vat--
  Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?
  In this light the blood is black.
  Tell me my name.



  4.  _The Beast_

  He was bullman earlier,
  King of the dish, my lucky animal.
  Breathing was easy in his airy holding.
  The sun sat in his armpit.
  Nothing went mouldy.  The little invisibles
  Waited on him hand and foot.

  The blue sisters sent me to another school.
  Monkey lived under the dunce cap.
  He kept blowing me kisses.
  I hardly knew him.

  He won't be got rid of:
  Mumblepaws, teary and sorry,
  Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's familiar.
  A dustbin's enough for him.
  The dark's his bone.
  Call him any name, he'll come to it.

  Mud-sump, happy sty-face.
  I've married a cupboard of rubbish.
  I bed in a fish puddle.
  Down here the sky is always falling.
  Hogwallow's at the window.
  The star bugs won't save me this month.
  I housekeep in Time's gut-end
  Among emmets and molluscs,
  Duchess of Nothing,
  Hairtusk's bride.



  5.  _Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond_

  Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,
  To our bower at the lily root.
  Overhead the old umbrellas of summer
  Wither like pithless hands.  There is little shelter.

  Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank
  Dominion.  The stars are no nearer.
  Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink
  The liquor of indolence, and all things sink

  Into a soft caul of forgetfulness.
  The fugitive colours die.
  Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,
  The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.

  Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppet-master,
  Wear masks of horn to bed.
  This is not death, it is something safer.
  The wingy myths won't tug at us any more:

  The moults are tongueless that sang from above the water
  Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,
  And how a god flimsy as a baby's finger
  Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air.



  6.  _Witch Burning_

  In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks.
  A thicket of shadows is a poor coat.  I inhabit
  The wax image of myself, a doll's body.
  Sickness begins here: I am a dartboard for witches.
  Only the devil can eat the devil out.
  In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

  It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door,
  The cellar's belly.  They've blown my sparkler out.
  A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.
  What large eyes the dead have!
  I am intimate with a hairy spirit.
  Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.

  If I am a little one, I can do no harm.
  If I don't move about, I'll knock nothing over.  So I said,
  Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.
  They are turning the burners up, ring after ring.
  We are full of starch, my small white fellows.  We grow.
  It hurts at first.  The red tongues will teach the truth.

  Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:
  I'll fly through the candle's mouth like a singeless moth.
  Give me back my shape.  I am ready to construe the days
  I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.
  My ankles brighten.  Brightness ascends my thighs.
  I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.



  7.  _The Stones_

  This is the city where men are mended.
  I lie on a great anvil.
  The flat blue sky-circle

  Flew off like the hat of a doll
  When I fell out of the light.  I entered
  The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

  The mother of pestles diminished me.
  I became a still pebble.
  The stones of the belly were peaceable,

  The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.
  Only the mouth-hole piped out,
  Importunate cricket

  In a quarry of silences.
  The people of the city heard it.
  They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate,

  The mouth-hole crying their locations.
  Drunk as a foetus
  I suck at the paps of darkness.

  The food tubes embrace me.  Sponges kiss my lichens away.
  The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry
  Open one stone eye.

  This is the after-hell: I see the light.
  A wind unstoppers the chamber
  Of the car, old worrier.

  Water mollifies the flint lip,
  And daylight lays its sameness on the wall.
  The grafters are cheerful,

  Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers.
  A current agitates the wires
  Volt upon volt.  Catgut stitches my fissures.

  A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.
  The storerooms are full of hearts.
  This is the city of spare parts.

  My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber.
  Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.
  On Fridays the little children come

  To trade their hooks for hands.
  Dead men leave eyes for others.
  Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.

  Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
  The vase, reconstructed, houses
  The elusive rose.

  Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
  My mendings itch.  There is nothing to do.
  I shall be good as new.






[End of The Colossus, by Sylvia Plath]