The Colossus: And Other Poems (7 page)

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.