Ariel: The Restored Edition (3 page)

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat

Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

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

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

They concentrate my attention, that was happy

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are 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.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

A secret! A secret!

How superior.

You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman,

Holding up one palm——

A difference between us?

I have one eye, you have two.

The secret is stamped on you,

Faint, undulant watermark.

Will it show in the black detector?

Will it come out

Wavery, indelible, true

Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery,

The Moroccan hippopotamus?

They stare from a square, stiff frill.

They are for export,

One a fool, the other a fool.

A secret! An extra amber

Brandy finger

Roosting and cooing ‘You, you’

Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys.

A knife that can be taken out

To pare nails,

To lever the dirt.

‘It won’t hurt.’

An illegitimate baby——

That big blue head!

How it breathes in the bureau drawer.

‘Is that lingerie, pet?

‘It smells of salt cod, you had better

Stab a few cloves in an apple,

Make a sachet or

Do away with the bastard.

Do away with it altogether.’

‘No, no, it is happy there.’

‘But it wants to get out!

Look, look! It is wanting to crawl.’

My god, there goes the stopper!

The cars in the Place de la Concorde——

Watch out!

A stampede, a stampede——

Horns twirling, and jungle gutterals.

An exploded bottle of stout,

Slack foam in the lap.

You stumble out,

Dwarf baby,

The knife in your back.

‘I feel weak.’

The secret is out.

My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.

The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position

With the same trees and headstones.

Is that all he can come up with,

The rattler of keys?

I have been drugged and raped.

Seven hours knocked out of my right mind

Into a black sack

Where I relax, foetus or cat,

Lever of his wet dreams.

Something is gone.

My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin

Drops me from a terrible altitude.

Carapace smashed,

I spread to the beaks of birds.

O little gimlets——

What holes this papery day is already full of!

He has been burning me with cigarettes,

Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.

I am myself. That is not enough.

The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.

My ribs show. What have I eaten?

Lies and smiles.

Surely the sky is not that color,

Surely the grass should be rippling.

All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,

I dream of someone else entirely.

And he, for this subversion

Hurts me, he

With his armory of fakery,

His high, cold masks of amnesia.

How did I get here?

Indeterminate criminal,

I die with variety——

Hung, starved, burned, hooked.

I imagine him

Impotent as distant thunder,

In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.

I wish him dead or away.

That, it seems, is the impossibility.

That being free. What would the dark

Do without fevers to eat?

What would the light

Do without eyes to knife, what would he

Do, do, do without me.

for Susan ONeill Roe

What a thrill

My thumb instead of an onion.

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 Indians 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, every one.

Whose side are they on?

O my

Homunculus, I am ill.

I have taken a pill to kill

The thin

Papery feeling.

Saboteur,

Kamikaze man

The stain on your

Gauze Ku Klux Klan

Babushka

Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled

Pulp of your heart

Confronts its small

Mill of silence

How you jump

Trepanned veteran,

Dirty girl,

Thumb stump.

(
for Ruth Fainlight
)

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:

It is what you fear.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,

Its dissatisfactions?

Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.

How you lie and cry after it

Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,

Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,

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.

I let her go. I let her go

Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.

How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?

Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.

What is this, this face

So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids hiss.

It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults

That kill, that kill, that kill.

A smile fell in the grass.

Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances

Lose themselves. In mathematics?

Such pure leaps and spirals——

Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely

Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass

Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.

Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself——

Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets

Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.

So your gestures flake off——

Warm and human, then their pink light

Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

Why am I given

These lamps, these planets

Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white

On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.

Nowhere.

What was she doing when it blew in

Over the seven hills, the red furrow, the blue mountain?

Was she arranging cups? It is important.

Was she at the window, listening?

In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.

That is the valley of death, though the cows thrive.

In her garden the lies were shaking out their moist silks

And the eyes of the killer moving sluglike and sidelong,

Unable to face the fingers, those egotists.

The fingers were tamping a woman into a wall,

A body into a pipe, and the smoke rising.

This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen,

These are the deceits, tacked up like family photographs,

And this is a man, look at his smile,

The death weapon? No-one is dead.

There is no body in the house at all.

There is the smell of polish, there are plush carpets.

There is the sunlight, playing its blades,

Bored hoodlum in a red room

Where the wireless talks to itself like an elderly relative.

Did it come like an arrow, did it come like a knife?

Which of the poisons is it?

Which of the nerve-curlers, the convulsors? Did it electrify?

This is a case without a body.

The body does not come into it at all.

It is a case of vaporization.

The mouth first, its absence reported

In the second year. It had been insatiable

And in punishment was hung out like brown fruit

To wrinkle and dry.

The breasts next.

These were harder, two white stones.

The milk came yellow, then blue and sweet as water.

There was no absence of lips, there were two children,

But their bones showed, and the moon smiled.

Then the dry wood, the gates,

The brown motherly furrows, the whole estate.

We walk on air, Watson.

There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus.

There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.