The Colossus and Other Poems Read online

  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 labour of love, and that labour 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 BULL OF BENDYLAW

  The black bull bellowed before the sea.

  The sea, till that day orderly,

  Hove up against Bendylaw.

  The queen in the mulberry arbour 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.

  ALL THE DEAD DEARS

  In the Archaeological 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 rick

  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.

  AFTERMATH

  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.

  THE THIN PEOPLE

  They are always with us, the thin people

  Meagre 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 colour.

  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.

  SUICIDE OFF EGG ROCK

  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 updraught.

  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

  Ravelled 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 smouldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,

  His body beac
hed 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.

  MUSHROOMS

  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.

  I WANT, I WANT

  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.

  WATERCOLOUR OF GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS

  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 colour.

  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

  Cat-tails 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.

  THE GHOST’S LEAVETAKING

  Enter the chilly no-man’s land of about

  Five o’clock in the morning, the no-colour void

  Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot

  Of sulphurous 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 colour 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.

  METAPHORS

  I’m a riddle in nine syllables,

  An elephant, a ponderous house,

  A melon strolling on two tendrils.

  O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

  This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.

  Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.

  I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

  I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,

  Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

  BLACK ROOK IN RAINY WEATHER

  On the stiff twig up there

  Hunches a wet black rook

  Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

  I do not expect miracle

  Or an accident

  To set the sight on fire

  In my eye, nor seek

  Any more in the desultory weather some design,

  But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

  Without ceremony, or portent.

  Although, I admit, I desire,

  Occasionally, some backtalk

  From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:

  A certain minor light may still

  Leap incandescent

  Out of kitchen table or chair

  As if a celestial burning took

  Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—

  Thus hallowing an interval

  Otherwise inconsequent

  By bestowing largesse, honour,

  One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

  Wary (for it could happen

  Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,

  Yet politic; ignorant

  Of whatever angel may choose to flare

  Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

  Ordering its black feathers can so shine

  As to seize my senses, haul

  My eyelids up, and grant

  A brief respite from fear

  Of total neutrality. With
luck,

  Trekking stubborn through this season

  Of fatigue, I shall

  Patch together a content

  Of sorts. Miracles occur,

  If you care to call those spasmodic

  Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,

  The long wait for the angel,

  For that rare, random descent.

  A WINTER SHIP

  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 harbour 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.

  FULL FATHOM FIVE

  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