Ariel: The Restored Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

water,
    Loveless as the multiplication table.
    While the child smiles into thin air.
     
    Six months in the world, and she is able
    To rock on all fours like a padded hammock.
    For her, the heavy notion of Evil
     
    Attending her cot is less than a belly ache,
    And Love the mother of milk, no theory.
    They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.
     
    They want the crib of some lamp-headed Plato.
    Let them astound his heart with their merit.
    What girl ever flourished in such company?
     

Lesbos
     
     
    Viciousness in the kitchen!
    The potatoes hiss.
    It is all Hollywood, windowless,
    The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,
    Coy paper strips for doors
    Stage curtains, a widows frizz.
    And I, love, am a pathological liar,
    And my childlook at her, face down on the floor,
    Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear
    Why she is a schizophrenic,
    Her face red and white, a panic.
    You have stuck her kittens outside your window
    In a sort of cement well
    Where they crap and puke and cry and she cant hear.
    You say you cant stand her,
    The bastards a girl.
    You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio
    Clear of voices and history, the staticky
    Noise of the new.
    You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
    You say I should drown my girl.
    Shell cut her throat at ten if shes mad at two.
    The baby smiles, fat snail,
    From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
    You could eat him. Hes a boy.
    You say your husband is just no good to you,
    His Jew-mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.
    You have one baby, I have two.
    I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
    I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
    We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
    Me and you.
    Meanwhile theres a stink of fat and baby crap.
    Im doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
    The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
    Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,
    Our bones, our hair.
    I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.
    The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you t.b.
    Once you were beautiful.
    In New York, Hollywood, the men said: Through?
    Gee baby, you are rare.
    You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.
    The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.
    I try to keep him in,
    An old pole for the lightning,
    The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.
    He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,
    Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.
    The blue sparks spill,
    Splitting like quartz into a million bits.
     
    O jewel. O valuable.
    That night the moon
    Dragged its blood bag, sick
    Animal
    Up over the harbor lights.
    And then grew normal,
    Hard and apart and white.
    The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.
    We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,
    Working it like dough, a mulatto body,
    The silk grits.
    A dog picked up your doggy husband. They went on.
     
    Now I am silent, hate
    Up to my neck,

    Thick, thick.
    I do not speak.
    I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
    I am packing the babies,
    I am packing the sick cats.
    O vase of acid,
    It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
    He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate
    That opens to the sea
    Where it drives in, white and black,
    Then spews it back.
    Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
    You are so exhausted.
    Your voice my ear-ring,
    Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.
    That is that. That is that.
    You peer from the door,
    Sad hag. Every womans a whore.
    I cant communicate.
     
    I see your cute dcor
    Close on you like the fist of a baby
    Or an anemone, that sea
    Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.
    I am still raw.
    I say I may be back.
    You know what lies are for.
     
    Even in your Zen heaven we shant meet.
     

The Other
     
     
    You come in late, wiping your lips.
    What did I leave untouched on the doorstep
     
    White Nike,
    Streaming between my walls?
     
    Smilingly, blue lightning
    Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.
     
    The police love you, you confess everything.
    Bright