Read The Colossus Page 4


  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 Harbor

  I came before the water-

  Colorists 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 airy thatching

  Of the dense grasses I found

  The husk of a fiddler-crab,

  Intact, strangely strayed above

  His world of mud—green color

  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 rôtisserie 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 carcass has foundered under

  The rubbish of summers, the black-leaved falls.

  Now little weeds insinuate

  Soft suede tongues between his bones.

  His armorplate, his toppled stones

  Are an esplanade for crickets.

  I pick and pry like a doctor or

  Archæologist among

  Iron entrails, enamel bowls,

  The coils and pipes that made him run.

  The small dell eats what ate it o
nce.

  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 cattails.

  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 door-step.

  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.

  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 colors 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 molts 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.

  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 fetus

  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 ear, 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.

 


 

  Sylvia Plath, The Colossus

  (Series: # )

 

 


 

 
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