The Colossus: And Other Poems (2 page)

God knows how our neighbor managed to breed

His great sow:

Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way

He kept the sow—impounded from public stare,

Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour

Through his lantern-lit

Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:

This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling

With a penny slot

For thrifty children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,

About to be

Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

In a parsley halo;

Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,

Mire-smirched, blowzy,

Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise—

Bloat tun of milk

On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

Shrilling her hulk

To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast

Brobdingnag bulk

Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,

Fat-rutted eyes

Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood must

Thus wholly engross

The great grandam!—our marvel blazoned a knight,

Helmed, in cuirass,

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat

By a grisly-bristled

Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow’s heat.

But our farmer whistled,

Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,

And the green-copse-castled

Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,

Slowly, grunt

On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

A monument

Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want

Made lean Lent

Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,

Proceeded to swill

The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.

Blameless as daylight I stood looking

At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,

Tails streaming against the green

Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking

White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,

Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing

Away to the left like reeds in a sea

When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,

Needling it dark. Then I was seeing

A melding of shapes in a hot rain:

Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,

Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,

Beasts of oasis, a better time.

Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:

Red cinder around which I myself,

Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush

Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:

It sticks, and it has stuck a week.

I wear the present itch for flesh,

Blind to what will be and what was.

I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was

Before the bed, before the knife,

Before the brooch-pin and the salve

Fixed me in this parenthesis;

Horses fluent in the wind,

A place, a time gone out of mind.

Flintlike, her feet struck

Such a racket of echoes from the steely street,

Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black

Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite

Its tinder and shake

A firework of echoes from wall

To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages.

But the echoes died at her back as the walls

Gave way to fields and the incessant seethe of grasses

Riding in the full

Of the moon, manes to the wind,

Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea

Moves on its root. Though a mist-wraith wound

Up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high

Ahead, it fattened

To no family-featured ghost,

Nor did any word body with a name

The blank mood she walked in. Once past

The dream-peopled village, her eyes entertained no dream,

And the sandman’s dust

Lost luster under her footsoles.

The long wind, paring her person down

To a pinch of flame, blew its burdened whistle

In the whorl of her ear, and like a scooped-out pumpkin crown

Her head cupped the babel.

All the night gave her, in return

For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat

Of her heart was the humped indifferent iron

Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set

On black stone. Barns

Guarded broods and litters

Behind shut doors; the dairy herds

Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders;

Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool, and birds,

Twig-sleeping, wore

Granite ruffs, their shadows

The guise of leaves. The whole landscape

Loomed absolute as the antique world was

Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap,

Unaltered by eyes,

Enough to snuff the quick

Of her small heat out, but before the weight

Of stones and hills of stones could break

Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light

She turned back.

Haunched like a faun, he hooed

From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost

Until all owls in the twigged forest

Flapped black to look and brood

On the call this man made.

No sound but a drunken coot

Lurching home along river bank.

Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank

Of double star-eyes lit

Boughs where those owls sat.

An arena of yellow eyes

Watched the changing shape he cut,

Saw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout

Goat-horns. Marked how god rose

And galloped woodward in that guise.

The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green;

Green, also, the grapes on the green vine

Shading the brickred porch tiles.

The money’s run out.

How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters.

Ungifted, ungrieved, our leavetaking.

The sun shines on unripe corn.

Cats play in the stalks.

Retrospect shall not soften such penury—

Sun’s brass, the moon’s steely patinas,

The leaden slag of the world—

But always expose

The scraggy rock spit shielding the town’s blue bay

Against which the brunt of outer sea

Beats, is brutal endlessly.

Gull-fouled, a stone hut

Bares its low lintel to corroding weathers:

Across that jut of ochreous rock

Goats shamble, morose, rank-haired,

To lick the sea-salt.

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It’s worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull plates and clear

The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing.