The Colossus: And Other Poems (3 page)

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 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 flux of silver

Those great goddesses of peace.

Stone, stone, ferry me down there.

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 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.

The black bull bellowed before the sea.

The sea, till that day orderly,

Hove up against Bendylaw.

The queen in the mulberry arbor 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.

In the Archæological 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 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.

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.

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 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 color.

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.