The Colossus: And Other Poems (4 page)

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled

On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,

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 flock to flap off 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 filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole

Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.

The words in his book wormed off 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.

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 fists 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.

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.

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 flux 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.

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 first 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.

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 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.