Ariel: The Restored Edition Read Online Free PDF

hair, shoe-black, old plastic,
     
    Is my life so intriguing?
    Is it for this you widen your eye-rings?
     
    Is it for this the air motes depart?
    They are not air motes, they are corpuscles.
     
    Open your handbag. What is that bad smell?
    It is your knitting, busily
     
    Hooking itself to itself,
    It is your sticky candies.
     
    I have your head on my wall.
    Navel cords, blue-red and lucent,
     
    Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride.
    O moon-glow, o sick one,
     

    The stolen horses, the fornications
    Circle a womb of marble.
     
    Where are you going
    That you suck breath like mileage?
     
    Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream.
    Cold glass, how you insert yourself
     
    Between myself and myself.
    I scratch like a cat.
     
    The blood that runs is dark fruit
    An effect, a cosmetic.
     
    You smile.
    No, it is not fatal.
     

Stopped Dead
     
     
    A squeal of brakes.
    Or is it a birth cry?
    And here we are, hung out over the dead drop
    Uncle, pants factory Fatso, millionaire.
    And you out cold beside me in your chair.
     
    The wheels, two rubber grubs, bite their sweet tails.
    Is that Spain down there?
    Red and yellow, two passionate hot metals
    Writhing and sighing, what sort of a scenery is it?
    It isn’t England, it isn’t France, it isn’t Ireland.
     
    It’s violent. We’re here on a visit,
    With a goddam baby screaming off somewhere.
    There’s always a bloody baby in the air.
    I’d call it a sunset, but
    Whoever heard a sunset yowl like that?
     
    You are sunk in your seven chins, still as a ham.
    Who do you think I am,
    Uncle, uncle?
    Sad Hamlet, with a knife?
    Where do you stash your life?
     
    Is it a penny, a pearl——
    Your soul, your soul?
    I’ll carry it off like a rich pretty girl,
    Simply open the door and step out of the car
    And live in Gibraltar on air, on air.
     

Poppies in October
     
    for Helder and Suzette Macedo
     
     
    Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
    Nor the woman in the ambulance
    Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly
     
    A gift, a love gift
    Utterly unasked for
    By a sky
     
    Palely and flamily
    Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
    Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
     
    O my God, what am I
    That these late mouths should cry open
    In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers!
     

The Courage of Shutting-Up
     
     
    The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!
    The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking.
    There are black discs behind it, the discs of outrage,
    And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it.
    The discs revolve, they ask to be heard,
     
    Loaded, as they are, with accounts of bastardies.
    Bastardies, usages, desertions and doubleness,
    The needle journeying in its groove,
    Silver beast between two dark canyons,
    A great surgeon, now a tattooist,
     
    Tattooing over and over the same blue grievances,
    The snakes, the babies, the tits
    On mermaids and two-legged dreamgirls.
    The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak.
    He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it.
     
    So the discs of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon.
    Then there is that antique billhook, the tongue,
    Indefatigable, purple. Must it be cut out?
    It has nine tails, it is dangerous.
    And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going.
     
    No, the tongue, too, has been put by
    Hung up in the library with the engravings of Rangoon
    And the fox heads, the otter heads, the heads of dead rabbits.
    It is a marvellous object
    The things it has pierced in its time!
     
    But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?
    Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms
    In which a torture goes on one can only watch.
    The face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man.
    Do not worry about the eyes
     
    They may be white and shy, they are no stool pigeons,
    Their death rays folded like flags
    Of a country no longer heard of,
    An obstinate independency
    Insolvent among the mountains.
     

Nick and the Candlestick
     
     
    I