Ariel: The Restored Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

am a miner. The light burns blue.
    Waxy stalacmites
    Drip and thicken, tears
     
    The earthen womb
    Exudes from its dead boredom.
    Black bat airs
     
    Wrap me, raggy shawls,
    Cold homicides.
    They weld to me like plums.
     
    Old cave of calcium
    Icicles, old echoer.
    Even the newts are white,
     
    Those holy Joes.
    And the fish, the fish
    Christ! they are panes of ice,
     
    A vice of knives,
    A piranha
    Religion, drinking
     
    Its first communion out of my live toes.
    The candle
    Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
     
    Its yellows hearten.
    O love, how did you get here?
    O embryo
     

    Remembering, even in sleep,
    Your crossed position.
    The blood blooms clean
     
    In you, ruby.
    The pain
    You wake to is not yours.
     
    Love, love,
    I have hung our cave with roses,
    With soft rugs
     
    The last of Victoriana.
    Let the stars
    Plummet to their dark address,
     
    Let the mercuric
    Atoms that cripple drip
    Into the terrible well,
     
    You are the one
    Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
    You are the baby in the barn.
     

Berck-Plage
     
     
    (1)
     
    This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
    How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation!
     
    Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
    By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.
     
    Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
    I have two legs, and I move smilingly.
     
    A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
    It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
     
    Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
    The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,
     
    Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
    Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
     
    Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?
    Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers
     
    Who wall up their backs against him.
    They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts
    of a body.
     
    The sea, that crystallized these,
    Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.
     

(2)
     
    This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
    Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,
     
    The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
    Who plumbs the well of his book,
     
    The bent print bulging before him like scenery.
    Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes,
     
    Breasts and hips a confectioner’s sugar
    Of little crystals, titillating the light,
     
    While a green pool opens its eye,
    Sick with what it has swallowed——
     
    Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers
    Two lovers unstick themselves.
     
    O white sea-crockery,
    What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat!
     
    And the onlooker, trembling,
    Drawn like a long material
     
    Through a still virulence,
    And a weed, hairy as privates.
     
(3)
     
    On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
    Things, things——
     

    Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.
    Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk
     
    Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
    I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
     
    I am not a smile.
    These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
     
    And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.
    This is the side of a man: his red ribs,
     
    The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:
    One mirrory eye——
     
    A facet of knowledge.
    On a striped mattress in one room
     
    An old man is vanishing.
    There is no help in his weeping wife.
     
    Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,
    And the tongue, sapphire of ash.
     
(4)
     
    A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
    How superior he is now.
     
    It is like possessing a saint.
    The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;
     
    They are browning, like touched gardenias.
    The bed is rolled from the wall.
     

    This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
    Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit
     
    Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak
    Rises so whitely, unbuffeted?
     
    They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened
    And folded his hands, that were shaking: