The Colossus: And Other Poems Read Online Free PDF

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.

Spinster
    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.

Frog Autumn
    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.

Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor
    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,