The Colossus: And Other Poems (6 page)

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 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.

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.

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 stray 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

Exact as a snowflake.

But here—a burgeoning

Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits

Into vulgar motley—

A treason not to be borne. Let idiots

Reel giddy in bedlam spring:

She withdrew neatly.

And round her house she set

Such a barricade of barb and check

Against mutinous weather

As no mere insurgent man could hope to break

With curse, fist, threat

Or love, either.

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.

The insects are scant, skinny.

In these palustral homes we only

Croak and wither.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.

The sun brightens tardily

Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us.

The fen sickens.

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly

The genius of plenitude

Houses himself elsewhere. Our folk thin

Lamentably.

I came before the water-

Colorists came to get the

Good of the Cape light that scours

Sand grit to sided crystal

And buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls

Of the three fishing smacks beached

On the bank of the river’s

Backtracking tail. I’d come for

Free fish-bait: the blue mussels

Clumped like bulbs at the grass-root

Margin of the tidal pools.

Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt

Mud stench, shell guts, gulls’ leavings;

Heard a queer crusty scrabble

Cease, and I neared the silenced

Edge of a cratered pool-bed.

The mussels hung dull blue and

Conspicuous, yet it seemed

A sly world’s hinges had swung

Shut against me. All held still.

Though I counted scant seconds,

Enough ages lapsed to win

Confidence of safe-conduct

In the wary otherworld

Eyeing me. Grass put forth claws;

Small mud knobs, nudged from under,

Displaced their domes as tiny

Knights might doff their casques. The crabs

Inched from their pygmy burrows

And from the trench-dug mud, all

Camouflaged in mottled mail

Of browns and greens. Each wore one

Claw swollen to a shield large

As itself—no fiddler’s arm

Grown Gargantuan by trade,

But grown grimly, and grimly

Borne, for a use beyond my

Guessing of it. Sibilant

Mass-motived hordes, they sidled

Out in a converging stream

Toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to

Meet the thin and sluggish thread

Of sea retracing its tide-

Way up the river-basin.

Or to avoid me. They moved

Obliquely with a dry-wet

Sound, with a glittery wisp

And trickle. Could they feel mud

Pleasurable under claws

As I could between bare toes?

That question ended it—I

Stood shut out, for once, for all,

Puzzling the passage of their

Absolutely alien

Order as I might puzzle

At the clear tail of Halley’s

Comet coolly giving my

Orbit the go-by, made known

By a family name it

Knew nothing of. So the crabs

Went about their business, which

Wasn’t fiddling, and I filled

A big handkerchief with blue

Mussels. From what the crabs saw,

If they could see, I was one

Two-legged mussel-picker.

High on the airy thatching

Of the dense grasses I found

The husk of a fiddler-crab,

Intact, strangely strayed above

His world of mud—green color

And innards bleached and blown off

Somewhere by much sun and wind;

There was no telling if he’d

Died recluse or suicide

Or headstrong Columbus crab.

The crab-face, etched and set there,

Grimaced as skulls grimace: it

Had an Oriental look,

A samurai death mask done

On a tiger tooth, less for

Art’s sake than God’s. Far from sea—

Where red-freckled crab-backs, claws

And whole crabs, dead, their soggy

Bellies pallid and upturned,

Perform their shambling waltzes

On the waves’ dissolving turn

And return, losing themselves

Bit by bit to their friendly

Element—this relic saved

Face, to face the bald-faced sun.