Ariel

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.

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

DADDY You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time― Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic When it pours bean green over blue In the waters of beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You― Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not And less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two― The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never like you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

The blood jet is poetry There is no stopping it.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

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.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. --From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962

What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit's cry may be wilder But it has no soul.

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything.

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

My bones hold a stillness, the far Fields melt my heart.

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.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

Paralytic It happens. Will it go on? ---- My mind a rock, No fingers to grip, no tongue, My god the iron lung That loves me, pumps My two Dust bags in and out, Will not Let me relapse While the day outside glides by like ticker tape. The night brings violets, Tapestries of eyes, Lights, The soft anonymous Talkers: 'You all right?' The starched, inaccessible breast. Dead egg, I lie Whole On a whole world I cannot touch, At the white, tight Drum of my sleeping couch Photographs visit me ---- My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs, Mouth full of pearls, Two girls As flat as she, who whisper 'We're your daughters.' The still waters Wrap my lips, Eyes, nose and ears, A clear Cellophane I cannot crack. On my bare back I smile, a buddha, all Wants, desire Falling from me like rings Hugging their lights. The claw Of the magnolia, Drunk on its own scents, Asks nothing of life.

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.

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.

Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.

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.

No day is safe from news of you.

Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak.

I used to pray to recover you.

There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart - It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.

A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen. A far sea moves in my ear.

This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.

And we, too, had a relationship— Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.

All the gods know is destinations.

This is a case without a body. The body does not come into it at all.

There is a green in the air, Soft, delectable. It cushions me lovingly.

I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.