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Sylvia Plath The Colossus & Other Poems Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. She began publishing poems and stories as a teenager and by the time she entered Smith College had won several poetry prizes. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and married British poet Ted Hughes in London in 1956. The young couple moved to the States, where Plath became an instructor at Smith College. Later, they moved back to England, where Plath continued writing poetry and wrote her novel, The Bell Jar, which was rst published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England in 1963. On February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide. Her Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize. OceanofPDF.com
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FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1998 Copyright © 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, by Sylvia Plath All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1962. First published in England in somewhat di erent form by William Heinemann Ltd. eISBN: 978-0-307-80882-0 Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com v3.1 OceanofPDF.com
For Ted OceanofPDF.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Arts in Society, The Atlantic Monthly, Audience, Chelsea, Critical Quarterly, Encounter, Grecourt Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Horn Book, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, London Magazine, Mademoiselle, The Nation, The Observer, The Partisan Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Spectator, The Texas Literary Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement; also The New Yorker, where the following poems originally appeared: “Hardcastle Crags,” “Man in Black,” “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” and “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows.” I would also like to thank Elizabeth Ames and the Trustees at Yaddo, where many of the poems were written. OceanofPDF.com
CONTENTS Cover About the Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Acknowledgments 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 O Egg Rock Mushrooms I Want, I Want Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows
The Ghost’s Leavetaking A Winter Ship Full Fathom Five Blue Moles Strumpet Song Man in Black Snakecharmer The Hermit at Outermost House The Disquieting Muses Medallion The Companionable Ills Moonrise Spinster Frog Autumn Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor The Beekeeper’s Daughter The Times Are Tidy The Burnt-out Spa Sculptor Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond The Stones OceanofPDF.com
The Manor Garden The fountains are dry and the roses over. Incense of death. Your day approaches. The pears fatten like little buddhas. A blue mist is dragging the lake. You move through the era of shes, The smug centuries of the pig— Head, toe and nger Come clear of the shadow. History Nourishes these broken utings, 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 di cult borning. OceanofPDF.com
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, a oat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Fingering a lea et of music, over him, Both of them deaf to the ddle in the hands Of the death’s-head shadowing their song.
These Flemish lovers ourish; not for long. Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country Foolish, delicate, in the lower right-hand corner. OceanofPDF.com
Night Shift It was not a heart, beating, That muted boom, that clangor Far o , 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. OceanofPDF.com
Sow God knows how our neighbor 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 Glori ed for prime esh 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- lmed. 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 st thwacked the barrel nape, And the green-copse-castled Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop, Slowly, grunt On grunt, up in the ickering 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. OceanofPDF.com
The Eye-mote Blameless as daylight I stood looking At a eld 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 owing Away to the left like reeds in a sea When the splinter ew 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 ush Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week. I wear the present itch for esh, 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 uent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind. OceanofPDF.com
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 rework of echoes from wall To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages. But the echoes died at her back as the walls Gave way to elds 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 ssured 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 luster under her footsoles. The long wind, paring her person down To a pinch of ame, 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 indi erent 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 ru s, 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 snu 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. OceanofPDF.com
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. OceanofPDF.com
Departure The gs on the g 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 labored 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 uted 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-color. 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 shnets Though shermen are sleeping, The massive castle turrets Doubling themselves in a glass All stillness. Yet these shapes oat 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 harborage; 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 ux of silver Those great goddesses of peace. Stone, stone, ferry me down there. OceanofPDF.com
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 lled-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 labor of love, and that labor 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 arbor stared Sti as a queen on a playing card. The king ngered 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 orid 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. OceanofPDF.com
All the Dead Dears In the Archæological Museum in Cambridge is a stone co n 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-sti 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 shpond 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 tick 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. OceanofPDF.com
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. OceanofPDF.com
The Thin People They are always with us, the thin people Meager 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 ea-ridden donkey skins, Empty of complaint, forever Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore The insu erable 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 lls with color. They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper Frieze of cabbage-roses and corn owers 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 sti Battalions. See, how the tree boles atten 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. OceanofPDF.com
Suicide O Egg Rock Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled On the public grills, and the ochreous salt ats, Gas tanks, factory stacks—that landscape Of imperfections his bowels were part of— Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraft. 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 Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave. A mongrel working his legs to a gallop Hustled a gull ock to ap o the sandspit. He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold, His body beached with the sea’s garbage, A machine to breathe and beat forever. Flies ling in through a dead skate’s eyehole Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber. The words in his book wormed o 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 sts 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. OceanofPDF.com
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. OceanofPDF.com
Watercolor 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 color. Cloudrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over The bland Granta double their white and green World under the sheer water And ride that ux at anchor, upside down. The punter sinks his pole. In Byron’s pool Cattails 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. OceanofPDF.com
The Ghost’s Leavetaking Enter the chilly no-man’s land of about Five o’clock in the morning, the no-color void Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot Of sulfurous 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 rst 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 color 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 at harbor anchored in The round of his yellow eye-button. A blimp swims up like a day-moon or tin Cigar over his rink of shes. 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 edi ce 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. OceanofPDF.com
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- ung, 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 oat 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 su ers
Some strange injury And seems to die: so vapors Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea. The muddy rumors Of your burial move me To half-believe: your reappearance Proves rumors 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 humor 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, shin-bones, 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. OceanofPDF.com
Blue Moles 1 They’re out of the dark’s ragbag, these two Moles dead in the pebbled rut, Shapeless as ung 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 carcass makes a duel of the a air: 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, sti en in a family pose. Di cult 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 nal surfeit is just as far From the door as ever. What happens between us Happens in darkness, vanishes Easy and often as each breath. OceanofPDF.com
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. OceanofPDF.com
Man in Black Where the three magenta Breakwaters take the shove And suck of the grey sea To the left, and the wave Un sts 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, Snu -colored sand cli s 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 oor: a wave of ickering grass tongues Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes, Of sways and coilings, 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 Rules 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. OceanofPDF.com
The Hermit at Outermost House Sky and sea, horizon-hinged Tablets of blank blue, couldn’t, Clapped shut, atten this man out. The great gods, Stone-Head, Claw-Foot, Winded by much rock-bumping And claw-threat, realized 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. OceanofPDF.com
The Disquieting Muses Mother, mother, what illbred aunt Or what dis gured 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 ashlights like re ies 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 practicing, 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 traveling 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. OceanofPDF.com
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-colored arrow. Over my hand I hung him. His little vermilion eye Ignited with a glassed ame 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 ocher The way sun ruins a trout. Yet his belly kept its re Going under the chainmail,
The old jewels smoldering 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 rst 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 eshed with idiot petals. White catalpa owers tower, topple, Cast a round white shadow in their dying. A pigeon rudders down. Its fantail’s white. Vocation enough: opening, shutting White petals, white fantails, ten white ngers. Enough for ngernails to make half-moons Redden in white palms no labor reddens. White bruises toward color, 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 color 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, laboring Among the socketed white stars, your face Of candor pares white esh 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 a icted, she Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air, His gait stray uneven Through a rank wilderness of fern and ower. 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 snow ake. But here—a burgeoning Unruly enough to pitch her ve 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, st, threat Or love, either. OceanofPDF.com
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. OceanofPDF.com
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 bu s and sleeks the blunt hulls Of the three shing smacks beached On the bank of the river’s Backtracking tail. I’d come for Free sh-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 Con dence 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 do their casques. The crabs Inched from their pygmy burrows And from the trench-dug mud, all Camou aged in mottled mail Of browns and greens. Each wore one Claw swollen to a shield large As itself—no ddler’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 ddling, and I lled 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 ddler-crab, Intact, strangely strayed above
His world of mud—green color And innards bleached and blown o 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 esh, dark parings. In burrows narrow as a nger, 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. OceanofPDF.com
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. OceanofPDF.com
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 stu , 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 once.
And yet the ichor of the spring Proceeds clear as it ever did From the broken throat, the marshy lip. It ows o 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 imsy light; arms folded Watches his cumbrous world eclipse Inane worlds of wind and cloud. Bronze dead dominate the oor, Resistive, ruddy-bodied, Dwar ng us. Our bodies icker 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. OceanofPDF.com
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 sh-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 imsy as a baby’s nger
Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. OceanofPDF.com
The Stones This is the city where men are mended. I lie on a great anvil. The at blue sky-circle Flew o like the hat of a doll When I fell out of the light. I entered The stomach of indi erence, 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 molli es the int 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 ssures. 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 ngers shape a bowl for shadows. My mendings itch. There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new. OceanofPDF.com