The Colossus: And Other Poems Read Online Free PDF

I was one
    Two-legged mussel-picker.
    High on the airy thatching
    Of the dense grasses I found
    The husk of a fiddler-crab,
    Intact, strangely strayed above
    His world of mud—green color
    And innards bleached and blown off
    Somewhere by much sun and wind;
    There was no telling if he’d
    Died recluse or suicide
    Or headstrong Columbus crab.
    The crab-face, etched and set there,
    Grimaced as skulls grimace: it
    Had an Oriental look,
    A samurai death mask done
    On a tiger tooth, less for
    Art’s sake than God’s. Far from sea—
    Where red-freckled crab-backs, claws
    And whole crabs, dead, their soggy
    Bellies pallid and upturned,
    Perform their shambling waltzes
    On the waves’ dissolving turn
    And return, losing themselves
    Bit by bit to their friendly
    Element—this relic saved
    Face, to face the bald-faced sun.

The Beekeeper’s Daughter
    A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
    The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
    Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
    A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
    Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
    You move among the many-breasted hives,
    My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.
    Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
    The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
    In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
    The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
    To father dynasties. The air is rich.
    Here is a queenship no mother can contest—
    A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.
    In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
    Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
    I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
    Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
    Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
    Under the coronal of sugar roses
    The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

The Times Are Tidy
    Unlucky the hero born
    In this province of the stuck record
    Where the most watchful cooks go jobless
    And the mayor’s rôtisserie turns
    Round of its own accord.
    There’s no career in the venture
    Of riding against the lizard,
    Himself withered these latter-days
    To leaf-size from lack of action:
    History’s beaten the hazard.
    The last crone got burnt up
    More than eight decades back
    With the love-hot herb, the talking cat,
    But the children are better for it,
    The cow milk’s cream an inch thick.

The Burnt-out Spa
    An old beast ended in this place:
    A monster of wood and rusty teeth.
    Fire smelted his eyes to lumps
    Of pale blue vitreous stuff, opaque
    As resin drops oozed from pine bark.
    The rafters and struts of his body wear
    Their char of karakul still. I can’t tell
    How long his carcass has foundered under
    The rubbish of summers, the black-leaved falls.
    Now little weeds insinuate
    Soft suede tongues between his bones.
    His armorplate, his toppled stones
    Are an esplanade for crickets.
    I pick and pry like a doctor or
    Archæologist among
    Iron entrails, enamel bowls,
    The coils and pipes that made him run.
    The small dell eats what ate it once.
    And yet the ichor of the spring
    Proceeds clear as it ever did
    From the broken throat, the marshy lip.
    It flows off below the green and white
    Balustrade of a sag-backed bridge.
    Leaning over, I encounter one
    Blue and improbable person
    Framed in a basketwork of cattails.
    O she is gracious and austere,
    Seated beneath the toneless water!
    It is not I, it is not I.
    No animal spoils on her green door-step.
    And we shall never enter there
    Where the durable ones keep house.
    The stream that hustles us
    Neither nourishes nor heals.

Sculptor
FOR LEONARD BASKIN
    To his house the bodiless
    Come to barter endlessly
    Vision, wisdom, for bodies
    Palpable as his, and weighty.
    Hands moving move priestlier
    Than priest’s hands, invoke no vain
    Images of light and air
    But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone.
    Obdurate, in dense-grained wood,
    A bald angel blocks and shapes
    The flimsy light; arms folded
    Watches his cumbrous world