Ariel: The Restored Edition (4 page)

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of tor and distances.

Gods lioness,

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to

The brown arc

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.

White

Godiva, I unpeel

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The childs cry

Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Two. Of course there are two.

It seems perfectly natural now

The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded

And balled, like Blakes,

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

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

He tells me how badly I photograph.

He tells me how sweet

The babies look in their hospital

Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck,

Then the flutings of their Ionian

Death-gowns,

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,

The dew makes a star.

The dead bell,

The dead bell.

Somebodys done for.

The abstracts hover like dull angels:

Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye

Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals.

Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry,

Snow, chalk or suchlike. Theyre

The real thing, all right: the Good, the True

Salutary and pure as boiled water,

Loveless as the multiplication table.

While the child smiles into thin air.

Six months in the world, and she is able

To rock on all fours like a padded hammock.

For her, the heavy notion of Evil

Attending her cot is less than a belly ache,

And Love the mother of milk, no theory.

They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.

They want the crib of some lamp-headed Plato.

Let them astound his heart with their merit.

What girl ever flourished in such company?

Viciousness in the kitchen!

The potatoes hiss.

It is all Hollywood, windowless,

The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,

Coy paper strips for doors

Stage curtains, a widows frizz.

And I, love, am a pathological liar,

And my childlook at her, face down on the floor,

Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear

Why she is a schizophrenic,

Her face red and white, a panic.

You have stuck her kittens outside your window

In a sort of cement well

Where they crap and puke and cry and she cant hear.

You say you cant stand her,

The bastards a girl.

You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio

Clear of voices and history, the staticky

Noise of the new.

You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!

You say I should drown my girl.

Shell cut her throat at ten if shes mad at two.

The baby smiles, fat snail,

From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.

You could eat him. Hes a boy.

You say your husband is just no good to you,

His Jew-mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.

You have one baby, I have two.

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,

Me and you.

Meanwhile theres a stink of fat and baby crap.

Im doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

The smog of cooking, the smog of hell

Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,

Our bones, our hair.

I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you t.b.

Once you were beautiful.

In New York, Hollywood, the men said: Through?

Gee baby, you are rare.

You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.

The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.

I try to keep him in,

An old pole for the lightning,

The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.

He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,

Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.

The blue sparks spill,

Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

O jewel. O valuable.

That night the moon

Dragged its blood bag, sick

Animal

Up over the harbor lights.

And then grew normal,

Hard and apart and white.

The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.

We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,

Working it like dough, a mulatto body,

The silk grits.

A dog picked up your doggy husband. They went on.

Now I am silent, hate

Up to my neck,

Thick, thick.

I do not speak.

I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,

I am packing the babies,

I am packing the sick cats.

O vase of acid,

It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.

He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate

That opens to the sea

Where it drives in, white and black,

Then spews it back.

Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.

You are so exhausted.

Your voice my ear-ring,

Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.

That is that. That is that.

You peer from the door,

Sad hag. Every womans a whore.

I cant communicate.

I see your cute dcor

Close on you like the fist of a baby

Or an anemone, that sea

Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.

I am still raw.

I say I may be back.

You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shant meet.

You come in late, wiping your lips.

What did I leave untouched on the doorstep

White Nike,

Streaming between my walls?

Smilingly, blue lightning

Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.

The police love you, you confess everything.

Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic,

Is my life so intriguing?

Is it for this you widen your eye-rings?

Is it for this the air motes depart?

They are not air motes, they are corpuscles.

Open your handbag. What is that bad smell?

It is your knitting, busily

Hooking itself to itself,

It is your sticky candies.

I have your head on my wall.

Navel cords, blue-red and lucent,

Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride.

O moon-glow, o sick one,

The stolen horses, the fornications

Circle a womb of marble.

Where are you going

That you suck breath like mileage?

Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream.

Cold glass, how you insert yourself

Between myself and myself.

I scratch like a cat.

The blood that runs is dark fruit

An effect, a cosmetic.

You smile.

No, it is not fatal.

A squeal of brakes.

Or is it a birth cry?

And here we are, hung out over the dead drop

Uncle, pants factory Fatso, millionaire.

And you out cold beside me in your chair.

The wheels, two rubber grubs, bite their sweet tails.

Is that Spain down there?

Red and yellow, two passionate hot metals

Writhing and sighing, what sort of a scenery is it?

It isn’t England, it isn’t France, it isn’t Ireland.

It’s violent. We’re here on a visit,

With a goddam baby screaming off somewhere.

There’s always a bloody baby in the air.

I’d call it a sunset, but

Whoever heard a sunset yowl like that?

You are sunk in your seven chins, still as a ham.

Who do you think I am,

Uncle, uncle?

Sad Hamlet, with a knife?

Where do you stash your life?

Is it a penny, a pearl——

Your soul, your soul?

I’ll carry it off like a rich pretty girl,

Simply open the door and step out of the car

And live in Gibraltar on air, on air.

for Helder and Suzette Macedo

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.

Nor the woman in the ambulance

Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly

A gift, a love gift

Utterly unasked for

By a sky

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!

The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!

The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking.

There are black discs behind it, the discs of outrage,

And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it.

The discs revolve, they ask to be heard,

Loaded, as they are, with accounts of bastardies.

Bastardies, usages, desertions and doubleness,

The needle journeying in its groove,

Silver beast between two dark canyons,

A great surgeon, now a tattooist,

Tattooing over and over the same blue grievances,

The snakes, the babies, the tits

On mermaids and two-legged dreamgirls.

The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak.

He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it.

So the discs of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon.

Then there is that antique billhook, the tongue,

Indefatigable, purple. Must it be cut out?

It has nine tails, it is dangerous.

And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going.

No, the tongue, too, has been put by

Hung up in the library with the engravings of Rangoon

And the fox heads, the otter heads, the heads of dead rabbits.

It is a marvellous object

The things it has pierced in its time!

But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?

Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms

In which a torture goes on one can only watch.

The face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man.

Do not worry about the eyes

They may be white and shy, they are no stool pigeons,

Their death rays folded like flags

Of a country no longer heard of,

An obstinate independency

Insolvent among the mountains.

I am a miner. The light burns blue.

Waxy stalacmites

Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.

Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,

Cold homicides.

They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium

Icicles, old echoer.

Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.

And the fish, the fish

Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,

A piranha

Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.

The candle

Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.

O love, how did you get here?

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,

Your crossed position.

The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.

The pain

You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses,

With soft rugs

The last of Victoriana.

Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric

Atoms that cripple drip

Into the terrible well,

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

You are the baby in the barn.