The Colossus: And Other Poems (5 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.