
Date of issue: 05.10.2014
Song language: English
Berck-Plage |
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 dad 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 hid 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 gray 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 facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils. |
It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place. |
The natural 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 glittler 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 lace 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 fershness, |
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 stil, 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. |
Name | Year |
---|---|
Daddy | 2013 |
The Surgeon at 2 A.M. | 2014 |
Tulips | 2014 |
Candles | 2014 |
On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad | 1958 |
Lady Lazarus | 2015 |
On the Plethora of Dryads | 1958 |
On the Decline of Oracles | 1958 |
Ariel: No. 5, Lady Lazarus ft. Phyllis Curtin, Joseph Rabbai, Ryan Edwards | 1990 |
Ariel: No. 1, Words ft. Phyllis Curtin, Joseph Rabbai, Ryan Edwards | 1990 |