Ariel: The Restored Edition (5 page)

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.

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.

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.

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: goodbye, goodbye.

Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,

The pillow cases are sweetening.

It is a blessing, it is a blessing:

The long coffin of soap-colored oak,

The curious bearers and the raw date

Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.

The grey sky lowers, the hills like a green sea

Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,

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

Blunt, practical boats

Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.

In the parlor of the stone house

One curtain is flickering from the open window,

Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.

This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.

How far he is now, his actions

Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor.

As the pallors gather——

The pallors of hands and neighborly faces,

The elate pallors of flying iris.

They are flying off into nothing: remember us.

The empty benches of memory look over stones,

Marble façades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.

It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.

The unnatural fatness of these lime leaves!——

Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.

The voice of the priest, in thin air,

Meets the corpse at the gate,

Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;

A glitter of wheat and crude earth.

What is the name of that color?——

Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,

Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.

The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,

Necessary among the flowers,

Enfolds her face like fine linen,

Not to be spread again.

While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,

Passes cloud after cloud.

And the bride flowers expend a freshness,

And the soul is a bride

In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.

Behind the glass of this car

The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.

And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party,

Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.

And the priest is a vessel,

A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,

Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,

A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips

Storming the hilltop.

Then, from the barred yard, the children

Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,

Their faces turning, wordless and slow,

Their eyes opening

On a wonderful thing——

Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,

And a naked mouth, red and awkward.

For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.

There is no hope, it is given up.

Over your body the clouds go

High, high and icily

And a little flat, as if they

Floated on a glass that was invisible.

Unlike swans,

Having no reflections;

Unlike you,

With no strings attached.

All cool, all blue. Unlike you

You, there on your back,

Eyes to the sky.

The spider-men have caught you,

Winding and twining their petty fetters,

Their bribes

So many silks.

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 off!

Step off seven leagues, like those distances

That revolve in Crivelli, untouchable.

Let this eye be an eagle,

The shadow of his lip, an abyss.

How far is it?

How far is it now?

The gigantic gorilla interior

Of the wheels move, they appal me

The terrible brains

Of Krupp, black muzzles

Revolving, the sound

Punching out Absence! like cannon.

It is Russia I have to get across, it is some war or other.

I am dragging my body

Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.

Now is the time for bribery.

What do wheels eat, these wheels

Fixed to their arcs like gods,

The silver leash of the will

Inexorable. And their pride!

All the gods know is destinations.

I am a letter in this slot

I fly to a name, two eyes.

Will there be fire, will there be bread?

Here there is such mud.

It is a trainstop, the nurses

Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery,

Touching their wounded,

The men the blood still pumps forward,

Legs, arms piled outside

The tent of unending cries

A hospital of dolls.

And the men, what is left of the men

Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood

Into the next mile,

The next hour

Dynasty of broken arrows!

How far is it?

There is mud on my feet,

Thick, red and slipping. It is Adams side,

This earth I rise from, and I in agony.

I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.

Steaming and breathing, its teeth

Ready to roll, like a devils.

There is a minute at the end of it

A minute, a dewdrop.

How far is it?

It is so small

The place I am getting to, why are there these obstacles

The body of this woman,

Charred skirts and deathmask

Mourned by religious figures, by garlanded children.

And now detonations

Thunder and guns.

The fires between us.

Is there no still place

Turning and turning in the middle air,

Untouched and untouchable.

The train is dragging itself, it is screaming

An animal

Insane for the destination,

The bloodspot,

The face at the end of the flare.

I shall bury the wounded like pupas,

I shall count and bury the dead.

Let their souls writhe in a dew,

Incense in my track.

The carriages rock, they are cradles.

And I, stepping from this skin

Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step to you from the black car of Lethe,

Pure as a baby.

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,

Eyes rolled by white sticks,

Ears cupping the seas incoherences,

You house your unnerving headGod-ball,

Lens of mercies,

Your stooges

Plying their wild cells in my keels shadow,

Pushing by like hearts,

Red stigmata at the very center,

Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,

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 didnt call you.

I didnt call you at all.

Nevertheless, nevertheless

You steamed to me over the sea,

Fat and red, a placenta

Paralyzing the kicking lovers.

Cobra light

Squeezing the breath from the blood bells

Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,

Dead and moneyless,

Overexposed, like an X ray.

Who do you think you are?

A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?

I shall take no bite of your body,

Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican.

I am sick to death of hot salt.

Green as eunuchs, your wishes

Hiss at my sins.

Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us.