ARIEL

,
 By the same author

ARIEL
THE CoLOSSUS (1960)

BY

SYLVIA PLATH

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

'New York
 , CONTENTS

FOR '.Foreword by Robert £owell vii

MORNING SONG 1
FRIEDA AND NICHOLAS TIlE COURIERS 2
SHEEP IN FOG 3
THE APPLICANT 4
LADY LAZARUS 5
TULIPS 10
CUT 13
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ELM 15
THE NIGHT DANCES 17
The poems Tulips, The Elm Speaks (appearing in this book as Elm)
POPPIES IN OCTOBER 19
and The Moon and the Yew Tree appeared originally in The New
Yorker. BERCK-PLAGE 20
ARIEL 26
Fever 1030 originally appeared in Poetry Magazine.
DEATH & CO. 28
A Birthday Present was originally published in Critical Quarterly-- LESBOS 30
England. NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK 33
Other poems in this book appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Encounter, GULLIVER 35
Harper's Magazine, London Magazine, the New York Review of Books GETTING THERE 36
and The Observer. MEDUSA 39
THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE 41
A BIRTHDAY PRESENT 42
MARY'S SONG 45

AIUEL. Copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 by Ted Hughes. Printed in the
LETTER IN NOVEMBER 46
United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or TIlE RIVAL 48
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address DADDY 49
Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y.10022. YOU'RE 52
FEVER 1030 53
LlBRAllY OP CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 66-15738
TIlE BEE MEETING 56
78 79 10
 FOREWORD
THE ARRIVAL OF THE BEE BOX 59

STINGS 61
THE SWARM • 64
In these poems, written in the last months of her life and often
WINTERING 67 rushed out at the rate of two or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes
THE HANGING MAN 69 herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly
UTILE FUGUE 70 created-hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another
YEARS 72 "poetess," but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical hero-
THE MUNICH MANNEQUINS 73 ines. This character is feminine, rather than female, though almost
TOTEM 75 everything we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head.
PARALYTIC 77 The voice is now coolly amused, witty, now sour, now fanciful, girl-
BALLOONS 79 ish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire-a
POPPIES IN JULY 81 Dido, Phaedra, or Medea, who can laugh at herself as "cow-heavy
KINDNESS 82 and floral in my Victorian nightgown." Though lines get repeated,
and sometimes the plot is lost, language never dies in her mouth.
CONTUSION 83
Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the
EDGE 84
manner of feeling is controlled hallucination, the autobiography of
WORDS 85
a fever. She burns to be on the move, a walk, a ride, a journey, the
flight of the queen bee. She is driven forward by the pounding pis-
tons of her heart. The title Ariel summons up Shakespeare's lovely,
though slightly chilling and androgenous spirit, but the truth is that
this Ariel is the author's horse. Dangerous, more powerful than
man, machinelike from hard training, she herself is a little like a
racehorse, galloping relentlessly with risked, outstretched neck,
death hurdle after death hurdle topped. She cries out for that rapid
life of starting pistols, snapping tapes, and new world records
broken. What is most heroic in her, though, is not her force, but the
desperate practicality of her control, her hand of metal with its
modest, womanish touch. Almost pure motion, she can endure
"God, the great stasis in his vacuous night," hospitals, fever, paraly-
sis, the iron lung, being stripped like a girl in the booth of a circus
sideshow, dressed like a mannequin, tied down like Gulliver by the
Lilliputians . . • apartments, babies, prim English landscapes, bee-

vii
hives, yew trees, gardens, the moon, hooks, the black boot, wounds, life are not a career; they tell that life, even when disciplined, is
flowers with mouths like wounds, Belsen's lampshades made of hu- simply not worth it.
man skin, Hitler's homicidal iron tanks clanking over Russia, Sui- It is poignant, looking back, to realize that the secret of Sylvia
cide, father-hatred, self-loathing-nothing is too much for the ma- Plath's last irresistible blaze lies lost somewhere in the checks and
cabre gaiety of her control. Yet it is too much; her art's immortality courtesies of her early laborious shyness. She was never a student of
is life's disintegration. The surprise, the shimmering, unwrapped mine, but for a couple of months seven years ago, she used to drop
birthday present, the transcendence "into the red eye, the cauldron in on my poetry seminar at Boston University. I see her dim against
of morning," and the lover, who are always waiting for her, are the bright sky of a high window, viewless unless one cared to look
Death, her own abrupt and defiant death. down on the city outskirts' defeated yellow brick and square concrete
pillbox filling stations. She was willowy, long-waisted, sharp-el-
He tells me how badly I photograph. bowed, nervous, giggly, gracious-a brilliant tense presence embar-
He tells me how sweet rassed by restraint. Her humility and willingness to accept what
The babies look in their hospital was admired seemed at times to give her an air of maddening docil-
Icebox, a simple ity that hid her unfashionable patience and boldness. She showed us
poems that later, more or less unchanged, went into her first book,
Frill at the neck, The Colossus. They were somber, formidably expert in stanza struc-
Then the flutings of their Ionian ture, and had a flair for alliteration and Massachusetts' low-tide
Death-gowns, dolor.
Then two little feet.
A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
There is a peculiar, haunting challenge to these poems. Probably Hustles the gull flock to flap off the sand-spit.
many, after reading Ariel, will recoil from their first overawed
shock, and painfully wonder why so much of it leaves them feeling Other lines showed her wit and directness.
empty, evasive and inarticulate. In her lines, I often hear the serpent
whisper, "Come, if only you had the courage, you too could have my The pears fatten like little Buddhas.
rightness, audacity and ease of inspiration." But most of us will turn
back. These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges Somehow none of it sank very deep into my awareness. I sensed her
in the cylinder, a game of "chicken," the wheels of both cars locked abashment and distinction, and never guessed her later appalling
and unable to swerve. Oh, for that heaven of the humble copyist, and triumphant fulfillment.

I•
those millennia of Egyptian artists repeating their lofty set patterns! ROBERT LOWELL
And yet Sylvia Plath's poems are not the celebration of some savage New York City
and debauched existence, that of the "damned" poet, glad to burn 1966
out his body for a few years of continuous intensity. This poetry and i

viii • IX
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 MORNING SONG

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

.•. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue .

In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a eat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

!
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 THE COURIERS SHEEP IN FOG

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf? The hills step off into whiteness.
It is not mine. Do not accept it. People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
Acetic acid in a sealed tin?
Do not accept it. It is not genuine. The train leaves a line of breath.
o slow
• A ring of gold with the sun in it? Horse the colour of rust,
Lies. Lies and a grief.
Hooves, dolorous bells--
All morning the
Frost on a leaf, the immaculate Morning has been blackening,
Cauldron, talking and crackling
A flower left out.
All to itself on the top of each My bones hold a stillness, the far
Of nine black Alps. Fields melt my heart.

A disturbance in mirrors, They threaten

The sea shattering its grey one-- To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Love, love, my season.

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 THE APPLICANT Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, In fifty, gold.
A brace or a hook, A living doll, everywhere you look.
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing? It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
Stop crying. You have a hole, it's a poultice.
Open your hand. You have an eye, it's an image.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit--

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

I
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that. i
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 LADY LAZARUS What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
I have done it again.
Them unwrap me hand and foot--
One year in every ten
The big strip tease.
I manage it--
Gentleman, ladies,
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
These are my hands,
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My knees.
My right foot
I may be skin and bone,
A paperweight,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
My face a featureless, fine
The first time it happened I was ten.
Jew linen. lt was an accident.
Peel off the napkin The second time I meant
o my enemy. To last it out and not come back at all.
Do I terrify?-- I rocked shut

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? As a seashell.
The sour breath They had to call and call
Will vanish in a day. And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Soon, soon the flesh Dying

The grave cave ate will be Is an art, like everything else.
At home on me I do it exceptionally well.

And I a smiling woman. I do it so it feels like hell.

I am only thirty. I do it so it feels real.
And like the cat I have nine times to die. I guess you could say I've a call.

This is Number Three. It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

What a trash It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
To annihilate each decade. It's the theatrical
6 7
Comeback in broad day
Herr God, Herr Lucifer ,
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Beware
Amused shout:
Beware.
"A miracle!"
That knocks me out. Out of the ash
There is a charge I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart-- • i

It really goes. •

And there is a charge, a very large charge,

For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash-
You poke and stir.

I.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling. ~
8
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 TULIPS Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. To lie wit? ~y hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free It IS,you have no idea how free-
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

•t
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses It is ,:hat th: dead close on, finally; I imagine them
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons. Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

They have propped my head !>etween the pillow and the sheet-cuff I. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. • E:en through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Llg~tly, through their white swaddlings, like an awf~l baby.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They ~re subtle:. they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. '
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
Nobody watched me before, now I am -watched
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow '
sleep. Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage-- And I.h.aveno face, I have wanted to efface myself. '
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. Befo~ethey came the air was calm enough,
Coming and. going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat ~hen the t~hps filled it up like a loud noise.
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. i ow the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
nagsand eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
he~ concentrate my attention, that was happy
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my tea-set, my bureaus of linen, my books Playmg and resting without committing itself.

10 II

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The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. CUT
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; 'Jor Susan O'Neill Roe
They arc opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
What a thrill-
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
My thumb instead of an onion.
And comes from a country far away as health.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
• Then that red plush .

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.

I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.

Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, everyone.

Whose side are they on?

amy
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

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The thin
Papery feeling.
ELM
Saboteur, 'Jor Ruth 'Jainlight
Kamikaze man--

The stain on your I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
Gauze Ku Klux Klan It is what you fear.
Babushka I do not fear it: I have been there.
Darkens and tarnishes and when
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
The balled
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small Love is a shadow.
Mill of silence How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
How you jump--
Trepanned veteran, All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Dirty girl, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Thumb stump. Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?

This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.

A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me

Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

IS
 I let her go. I let her go
THE NIGHT DANCES
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possessand endow me.
A smile fell in the grass.
I am inhabited by a cry. Irretrievable!
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?
I am terrified by this dark thing
I
That sleeps in me; Such pure leaps and spirals--
! Surely they travel
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings; its malignity.
Ii The world forever, I shall not entirely
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Sit emptied of beauties, the gift
•
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
Their flesh bears no relation.
So murderous in its strangle of branches ?--
Cold folds of ego, the calla,
Its snaky acids kiss. And the tiger, embellishing itself--
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults Spots, and a spread of hot petals.
That kill, that kill, that kill.
The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.

So your gestures flake off--

I
Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

Why am I given
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These lamps, these planets POPPIES IN OCTOBER
Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
On my eyes, my lips, my hair Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly--
Touching and melting.
Nowhere. A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
1 Bya sky

ti 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.
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 BEReK-PLACE (II)
This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,
(I)
This is the sea, then, this great abeyance. The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation. Who plumbs the well of his book,

Electrifyingly-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze The bent print bulging before him like scenery.

I
By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands. Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes,

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding? Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar
1 have two legs, and 1 move smilingly. Of little crystals, titillating the light,
!
While a green pool opens its eye,
A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
I Sick with what it has swallowed--
Waving and crutch less, half their old size.
i Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers
- Two lovers un stick themselves.
The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces, I
a whitesea-crockery,
Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat ....
Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
And the onlooker, trembling,
Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?
Drawn like a long material
Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers
Through a still virulence,
Who wall up their backs against him. ; And a weed, hairy as privates.
They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a I~
body.

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(III)
The sea, that crystallized these, On. the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress. Thtngs, things--
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 Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminium crutches.
This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk
Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit
Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak
I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
Rises so whitely unbuffeted?
I am not a smile.
They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened
These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.

I
And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.
Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,
This is the side of a man: his red ribs,
The pillow cases are sweetening.
The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:
One mirrory eye--
I It is a blessing, it is a blessing:
Ii The long coffin of soap-eoloured oak,
i.
A facet of knowledge.
! The curious bearers and the raw date
On a striped mattress in one room
Engraving itself in silver with marvellous calm.
An old man is vanishing.
There is no help in his weeping wife. I
(V)

Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable, The grey sky lowers, the hills like a green sea
And the tongue, sapphire of ash. Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,

- The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife--

(IV) Blunt, practical boats

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A wedding-eake face in a paper frill.
I Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.
How superior he is now.
In the parlour of the stone house
It is like possessing a saint.
One curtain is flickering from the open window,
The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;
Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.
They are browning, like touched gardenias.
This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.
The bed is rolled from the wall.
How far he is now, his actions
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 Around him like livingroom furniture, like a decor. Passescloud after cloud.
As the pallors gather-- And the bride flowers expend a freshness,

The pallors of hands and neighbourly faces, And the soul is a bride
The elate pallors of flying iris. In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.
They are flying off into nothing: remember us.
The empty benches of memory look over stones, (VII)

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Behind the glass of this car
Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils. The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.
It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.
And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party,
(VI)
••• Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.

The natural fatness of these lime leaves!--

Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.
IAnd the priest is a vessel,
A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,
I

The voice of the priest, in thin air, t Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,
Meets the corpse at the gate, i A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips

Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell; t Storming the hilltop.
A glitter of wheat and crude earth. Then, from the barred yard, the children

What is the name of that colour ?__ f~ Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,
Old blood of caked walls the sun heals, Their faces turning, wordless and slow,

Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts. • Their eyes opening

The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters, On a wonderful thing--

Necessary among the flowers, Six round black hats in the grass and a l~ienge of wood,
Enfolds her face like fine linen, And a naked mouth, red and awkward.

Not to be spread again. For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles, There is no hope, it is given up.

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 ARIEL Melts in the wall.
Andl
Stasis in darkness. Am the arrow,
Then the substanceless blue
The dew that flies
Pour of tor and distances.
Suicidal, at one with the drive
God's lioness, Into the red
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!- The furrow
I Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Splits and passes, sister to I

The brown arc i
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Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks--

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air--

Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
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White
Godiva, I unpeel--
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

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 The dew makes a star,
DEATH & CO.
The dead bell,
The dead bell.
Two, of course there are two.
Somebody's done for.
It seems perfectly natural now--
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled, like Blake's,
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark--

The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak
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Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
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He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet l
The babies look in their hospital i
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck,

Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns, !
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Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that,

His hair long and plausive.
Bastard
Masturbating a glitter,
He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
 LESBOS We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.

Viciousness in the kitchen! Meanwhile there's a stink of fat and baby crap.
The potatoes hiss. I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
It is all Hollywood, windowless, The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,
Coy paper strips for doors-- ' Our bones, our hair.
Stage curtains, a widow's frizz. I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.
And I, love, am a pathological
o liar , The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
And my child-look at her, face down on the floor, Once you were beautiful.
Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear-- In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: "Through?
Why she is schizophrenic, Gee baby, you are rare."
Her face red and white, a panic, ••.. You acted, acted, acted for the thrill .
You have stuck her kittens outside your window The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.
In a sort of cement well I try to keep him in,
Where they crap and puke and cry and she can't hear. An old pole for the lightning,
You say you can't stand her, The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.
The bastard's a girl. He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,
You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.
Clear of voices and history, the staticky The blue sparks spill,
Noise of the new. Splitting like quartz into a million bits.
You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
You say I should drown my girl. o jewel! 0 valuable!
She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two. That night the moon
The baby smiles, fat snail, Dragged its blood bag, sick
From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum. Animal
You could eat him. He's a boy. Up over the harbor lights.
You say your husband is just no good to you. And then grew normal,
His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl. Hard and apart and white.
You have one baby, I have two. The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.
I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair. We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair. Working it like dough, a mulatto body,

30 31

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. The silk grits.
NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK
A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

Now I am silent, hate

Up to my neck, I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Thick, thick. Waxy stalactites
I do not speak. Drip and thicken, tears
I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
I am packing the babies, The earthen womb
I am packing the sick cats. Exudes from its dead boredom.
o vase of acid, Black bat airs
It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
That opens to the sea !
They weld to me like plums.
Where it drives in, white and black,
Then spews it back. I Old cave of calcium
Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
You are so exhausted. i Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

•
Your voice my ear-ring,
Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.
Those holy [oes,
That is that. That is that. And the fish, the fish--
You peer from the door, Christ! They are panes of ice,
Sad hag. "Every woman's a whore.
I can't communicate." A vice of knives,
A piranha
I see your cute decor
Religion, drinking
Close on you like the fist of a baby
Or an anemone, that sea Its first communion out of my live toes.
Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.
The candle
I am still raw. Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for. Its yellows hearten.
Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.
o love, how did you get here?
o embryo
33

L
 Remembering, even in sleep, GULLIVER
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
Over your body the clouds go
In you, ruby. High, high and icily
The pain And a little flat, as if they
You wake to is not yours.
Floated on a glass that was invisible.
Love, love, Unlike swans,
I have hung our cave with roses. Having no reflections;
With soft rugs-
Unlike you,
With no strings attached.
The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars All cool, all blue. Unlike you-
Plummet to their dark address,
You, there on your back,
Eyes to the sky.
Let the mercuric
The spider-men have caught you,
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well, Winding and twining their petty fetters,
Their bribes-
You are the one So many silks.
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn. How they hate you.
They converse in the valley of your fingers, they are inchworms.
They would have you sleep in their cabinets,

This toe and that toe, a relic.

Step offl
Step off seven leagues, like those distances

That revolve in Crivelli, untouchable.

Let this eye be an eagle,
The shadow of this lip, an abyss.

35
34

L
 GETTING THERE The next hour--
Dynasty of broken arrows!
How far is it?
How far is it? There is mud on my feet,
How far is it now? Thick, red and slipping. It is Adam's side,
The gigantic gorilla interiors This earth I rise from, and I in agony.
Of the wheels move, they appal me-- I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.
The terrible brains Steaming and breathing, its teeth
Of Krupp, black muzzles Ready to roll, like a devil's.
Revolving, the sound There is a minute at the end of it
Punching out Absence! like cannon. A minute, a dewdrop.
It is Russia I have to get across, it is some war or other. How far is it?
I am dragging my body It is so small
Quietly through the straw of the boxcars. The place I am getting to, why are there these obstacles--
Now is the time for bribery. The body of this woman,
What do wheels eat, these wheels Charred skirts and deathmask
Fixed to their arcs like gods, Mourned by religious figures, by garlanded children.
The silver leash of the will-- And now detonations--
Inexorable. And their pride! Thunder and guns.
All the gods know is destinations. The fire's between us.

,
I am a letter in this slot-- Is there no still place
I fly to a name, two eyes. Turning and turning in the middle air,
Will there be fire, will there be bread? Untouched and untouchable.
Here there is such mud. The train is dragging itself, it is screaming--
It is a trainstop, the nurses An animal
Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery, Insane for the destination,
Touching their wounded, The bloodspot,
The men the blood still pumps forward, The face at the end of the flare.
Legs, arms piled outside I shall bury the wounded like pupas,
The tent of unending cries-- I shall count and bury the dead.
A hospital of dolls. Let their souls writhe in a dew,
And the men, what is left of the men Incense in my track.
Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood The carriages rock, they are cradles.
Into t he next mile,
37
 And I, stepping from this skin MEDUSA
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Pure as a baby. Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head-God-ball,
Lens of mercies,

Your stooges

1•
Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow,
• Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very centre,
•
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,
~:
I Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.

In any case, you are always there,

Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.

I didn't call you.

I didn't call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta

39

L
Paralyzing the kicking lovers. THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath, This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
Dead and moneyless, The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Overexposed, like an X-ray. Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Who do you think you are? Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary? Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I shall take no bite of your body, I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
Bottle in which I live,
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
Ghastly Vatican. White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
I am sick to death of hot salt. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
Green as eunuchs, your wishes With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Hiss at my sins. Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky--
Off, off, eely tentacle! Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
There is nothing between us.
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness--
The face of the effigy,gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness-blackness and silence.

L
 A BIRTHDAY PRESENT Do not be mean, I am ready fo~ enor~ity. ..
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is just what I want. I know why you will not give it to me,
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking You are terrified

"Is this the one I am to appear for, The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar? Bossed,brazen, an antique shield,

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules. Do not be afraid, it is not so.
••
Is this the one for the annunciation? I will only take it and go aside quietly.
My god, what a laugh!" You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me. No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I I would not mind if it was bones, or a pearl button. I do not think you credit me with this discretion.
!

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
After all I am alive only by accident.
• To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

The diaphanous satins of a January window Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,

White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. 0 ivory! Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

It must be a tusk there, a ghost-column. Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is? You are silver-suited for the occasion. 0 adding machine-

Can you not give it to me? Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Do not be ashamed-I do not mind if it is small. Must you stamp each piece in purple,

43

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 Must you kill what you can?
MARY'S SONG
There is this one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
It stands at my window, big as the sky.
The fat
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead centre
Sacrifices its opacity. . . .
Where spilt lives congeal and stiffen to history.
A window, holy gold.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
Their thick palls float
If it were death

14
• Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
Germany.
I would know you were serious.
They do not die.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.

i
Grey birds obsess my heart,
And the knife not carve, but enter
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.

I
They settle. On the high
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
o golden child the world will kill and eat.

I
Ij 45
44
I
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L
 LETTER IN NOVEMBER In a thick grey death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.
Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns colour. The streetlight o love, 0 celibate.
Splits through the rat's-tail Nobody but me
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning. Walks the waist-high wet.
It is the Arctic, The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.
This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses-babies' hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.

I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of old corpses.

I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it--

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls

46 47

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 THE RIVAL DADDY

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You do not do, you do not do
You leave the same impression Any more, black shoe
Of something beautiful, but annihilating. In which I have lived like a foot
Both of you are great light borrowers. For thirty years, poor and white,
Her a-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

And your first gift is making stone out of everything. Daddy, I have had to kill you.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, You died before I had time--
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes, Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous, Ghastly statue with one grey toe
And dying to say something unanswerable. Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

The moon, too, abases her subjects,
Where it pours bean green over blue
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
I used to pray to recover you.
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
Ach, duo
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
No day is safe from news of you, Scraped flat by the roller
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me. Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

49
 I could hardly speak. Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I thought every German was you. I was ten when they buried you.
And the language obscene At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
An engine, an engine I thought even the bones would do.
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. But they pulled me out of the sack,
I began to talk like a Jew. And they stuck me together with glue.
I think I may well be a Jew. And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
And a love of the rack and the screw.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

I
And I said I do, I do.
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
So daddy, I'm finally through.
I may be a bit of a Jew.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
-I If I've killed one man, I've killed two-
The vampire who said he was you
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
And drank my blood for a year,
Panzer-man, panzer-man, 0 You--
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through. There's a stake in your fat black heart
Every woman adores a Fascist, And the villagers never liked you.
I The boot in the face, the brute They are dancing and stamping on you.
Brute heart of a brute like you. They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

5°
 YOU'RE FEVER 1030

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Pure? What does it mean?
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled ,
The tongues of hell
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Are dull, dull as the triple
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Trawling your dark as owls do. Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of licking clean
Of July to All Fools' Day,
o high-riser, my little loaf. The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail. The indelible smell
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn. Of a snuffed candle!
Snug as a bud and at home Love, love, the low smokes roll
Like a sprat in a pickle jug. From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean. One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Right, like a well-done sum. Such yellow sullen smokes
A clean slate, with your own face on. Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe

Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,

The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopardl
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

53
 Greasing the bodies of adulterers Not you, nor him
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin. Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)--
Darling, all night To Paradise.
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Three days. Three nights.

Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern--

My head a moon
• Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.

All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,

I think I may rise--
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.

54 55
 They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
THE BEE MEETING
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.
Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the
villagers-- Is it some operation that is taking place?
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees. It is the surgeon my neighbours are waiting for,
In my sleevelesssummery dress I have no protection, This apparition in a green helmet,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me? Shining gloves and white suit.
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats. Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me? I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock, With its yellow purses, its spiky armoury.
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my I could not run without having to run forever.
knees. The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice. Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.
Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
Which is the rector now, is it that man in black? The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat? Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in If I stand very still, they will think I am cow parsley,
visors,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.
Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a bean-
Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
field.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible. Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
And a black veil that moulds to my face, they are making me one The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
of them. The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

57
I am exhausted, I am exhausted-- THE ARRIVAL OF THE BEE BOX
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not Hinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands. I ordered this, this clean wood box
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accom, Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
plished, why am I cold? I would say it was the coffinof a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.

I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it e ,

There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.

There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.

It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering ..

How can I let them out?

It is the noise that appals me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.

58 59
I wonder if they would forget me STINGS
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry. Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
They might ignore me immediately Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
In my moon suit and funeral veil. The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
I am no source of honey He and I
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
The box is only temporary. And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessivelove I enamelled it

Thinking "Sweetness, sweetness."

Brood cells grey as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?

If there is, she is old,

Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush-
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,

Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,

60 61
 Blue dew from dangerous skin. Now she is flying
Will they hate me, More terrible than she ever was, red
These women who only scurry, Scar in the sky, red comet
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover? Over the engine that killed her--
The mausoleum, the wax house.
It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin

To scour the creaming crests

As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone

In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.

Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain

Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Moulding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.

They thought death was worth it, but I

Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

62
 THE SWARM Russia, Poland and Germany!
The mild hills, the same old magenta
Fields shrunk to a penny
Somebody is shooting at something in our town-- Spun into a river, the river crossed.
A dull porn, porn in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood, The bees argue, in their black ball,
It can make black roses. A flying hedgehog, all prickles.
Who are they shooting at? The man with grey hands stands under the honeycomb
Of their dream, the hived station
It is you the knives are out for Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,
At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,
The hump of Elba on your short back, Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.
And the snow, marshalling its brilliant cutlery Porn! Porn! They fall
Mass after mass, saying Shh! Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.
So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army!
I
I' ~. Shh! These are chess people you play with, A red tatter, Napoleon!
Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats, The last badge of victory.
Stepping stones for French bootsoles. The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals
In the furnace of greed. Clouds, clouds. Worming themselves into niches.
So the swarm balls and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree. How instructive this is!
It must be shot down. Porn! Porn! The dumb, banded bodies
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder. Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery
Into a new mausoleum,
It thinks they are the voice of God An ivory palace, a crotch pine.
Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog
Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog, The man with grey hands smiles--
Grinning over its bone of ivory The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.
Like the pack, the pack, like everybody. They are not hands at all
But asbestos receptacles.
The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high! Porn! Porn! "They would have killed me."

64 65
 Stings big as drawing pins! WINTERING
It seems bees have a notion of honour,
A black, intractable mind.
Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything. This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
o Europe! 0 ton of honey' I have whirled the midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six eat's eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window

At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
And the bottles of empty glitters--
I Sir So-and-so's gin.

I
I'lro
This is the room I have never been in.
I This is the room I could never breathe in.
I, The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects--

Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees-the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

To make up for the honey I've taken.

66 67
 Tate and Lyle keeps them going, THE HANGING MAN
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of Bowers.
They take it. The cold sets in. By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.
Now they ball in a mass,
Black The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
Mind against all that white. A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen, A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.
Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
I Maids and the long royal lady.
L They have got rid of the men,
I
I The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women--
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas

Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

68

1
 LITTLE FUGUE Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.
The yew's black fingers wag;
Cold clouds go over. The yew my Christ, then.
So the deaf and dumb Is it not as tortured?
i;
Signal the blind, and are ignored. And you, during the Great War
In the California delicatessen
I like black statements.
The featurelessness of that cloud, now! Lopping the sausages!
White as an eye all over! They colour my sleep,
The eye of the blind pianist Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!
At my table on the ship.
He felt for his food. Great silence of another order.
His fingers had the noses of weasels. I was seven, I knew nothing.
I couldn't stop looking. The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.
He could hear Beethoven:
Black yew, white cloud, Now similar clouds
The horrific complications. Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
Finger-traps-a tumult of keys. Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.
Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I remember a blue eye,
I envy the big noises,
A briefcase of tangerines.
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge,
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.
Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father I
I see your voice I survive the while,
Arranging my morning.
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,
These are my fingers, this my baby.
A yew hedge of orders, The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor.

70 71
 YEARS THE MUNICH MANNEQUINS

They enter as animals from the outer Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Space of holly where spikes Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
Are not the thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
But greenness, darkness so pure
The tree of life and the tree of life
They freeze and are.
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
o God, I am not like you The blood flood is the flood of love,
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti. The absolute sacrifice.
Eternity bores me, It means: no more idols but me,
I never wanted it.
Me and you.
What I love is So, in their sulphur loveliness, in their smiles
The piston in motion--
My soul dies before it. These mannequins lean tonight
And the hooves of the horses, In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,
Their merciless churn.
Naked and bald in their furs,
And you, great Stasis-- Orange lollies on silver sticks,
What is so great in that!
Intolerable, without mind.
Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,
Is it a Christus,
The awful
Nobody's about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and setting
God-bit in him
Dying to fly and be done with it? Down shoes for a polish of carbon
The blood berries are themselves, they are very still. Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

The hooves will not have it, o the domesticity of these windows,
In blue distance the pistons hiss. The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,

73
 The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz. TOTEM
And the black phones on hooks

Glittering The engine is killing the track, the track is silver,

Glittering and digesting It stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless.

Voicelessness.The snow has no voice. Its running is useless.

At nightfall there is the beauty of drowned fields,

Dawn gilds the farmers like pigs,

Swaying slightly in their thick suits,

White towers of Smithfield ahead,

Fat haunches and blood on their minds.

There is no mercy in the glitter of cleavers,

The butcher's guillotine that whispers: "How's this, how's this?"

In the bowl the hare is aborted,

Its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spice,

Flayed of fur and humanity.

Let us eat it like Plato's afterbirth,

.~.
I!t

t
Let us eat it like Christ.
These are the people that were important--

Their round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces

On a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake.

Shall the hood of the cobra appal me--

The loneliness of its eye, the eye of the mountains

Through which the sky eternally threads itself?

The world is blood-hot and personal

74 75
 Dawn says, with its blood-flush. PARALYTIC
There is no terminus, only suitcases

Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit It happens. Will it go on ?--
Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes, My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. My god the iron lung
I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms.
That loves me, pumps
And in truth it is terrible, My two
Multiplied in the eyes of the flies. Dust bags in and out,
Will not
They buzz like blue children
Let me relapse
In nets of the infinite,
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.
The night brings violets,
Roped in at the end by the one
Tapestries of eyes,
Death with its many sticks.
Lights,
The soft anonymous
Talkers: "You all right?"
The starched, inaccessible breast.

~I
Dead egg, I lie
,,'
~~: Whole
On a whole world I cannot touch,
At the white, tight

Drum of my sleeping couch

Photographs visit me--
My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs,
Mouth full of pearls,

Two girls
As flat as she, who whisper "We're your daughters."

77
 The still waters BALLOONS
Wrap my lips,

Eyes, nose and ears, Since Christmas they have lived with us,
A clear Guileless and clear,
Cellophane I cannot crack. Oval soul-animals,
On my bare back Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk
II I smile, a buddha, all
Wants, desire Invisible air drifts,
Falling from me like rings Giving a shriek and pop
Hugging their lights. When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish--
The claw Such queer moons we live with
Of the magnolia,
Drunk on its own scents, Instead of dead furniture!
Asks nothing of life. Straw mats, white walls
And these travelling
UKi Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free

Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

79
Then sits POPPIES IN jut, Y
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water,
A red Little poppies, little hell flames,
Shred in his little fist. Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.

I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you

Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.

Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.

Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep!--

If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

Dulling and stilling.

But colourless. Colourless.

80 81
 KINDNESS CONTUSION

Kindness glides about my house. Colour floods to the spot, dull purple.
Dame Kindness, she is so nice! The rest of the body is all washed out,
The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke The colour of pearl.
In the windows, the mirrors
Are filling with smiles. In a pit of rock
The sea sucks obsessively,
What is so real as the cry of a child? One hollow the whole sea's pivot.
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul. The size of a fly,
Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says. The doom mark
Sugar is a necessary fluid, Crawls down the wall.

Its crystals a little poultice. The heart shuts,

o kindness, kindness The sea slides back,
Sweetly picking up pieces! The mirrors are sheeted.
My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,
May be pinned any minute, anaesthetized.

And here you come, with a cup of tea

Wreathed in steam.
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses.
 EDGE WORDS

The woman is perfected. Axes

Her dead After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Body wears the smile of accomplishment, Echoes travelling
The illusion of a Greek necessity Off from the centre like horses.
1'-'
j- Flows in the scrolls of her toga, The sap
Her bare Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
Feet seem to be saying: To re-establish its mirror
We have come so far, it is over. Over the rock

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, That drops and turns,
One at each little A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
Years later I
She has folded Encounter them on the road--

Them back into her body as petals

Words dry and riderless,
Of a rose close when the garden
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
Stiffens and odours bleed
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
Govern a life.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,

Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.

Her blacks crackle and drag.