Page 3 of The Colossus


  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 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 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 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.

  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 carcass 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.

  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-colored 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 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.

  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, 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.

  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 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.

  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 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 ocher

  The way sun ruins a trout.

  Yet his belly kept its fire

  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.

  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 fantail’s white.

  Vocation enough: opening, shutting

  White petals, white fantails, ten white fingers.

  Enough for fingernails 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 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 st
ray 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