I shall never get you put together entirely, <br />Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. <br />Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles <br />Proceed from your great lips. <br />It's worse than a barnyard. <br /> <br />Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, <br />Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. <br />Thirty years now I have labored <br />To dredge the silt from your throat. <br />I am none the wiser. <br /> <br />Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol <br />I crawl like an ant in mourning <br />Over the weedy acres of your brow <br />To mend the immense skull-plates and clear <br />The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. <br /> <br />A blue sky out of the Oresteia <br />Arches above us. O father, all by yourself <br />You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. <br />I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. <br />Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered <br /> <br />In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. <br />It would take more than a lightning-stroke <br />To create such a ruin. <br />Nights, I squat in the cornucopia <br />Of your left ear, out of the wind, <br /> <br />Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. <br />The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. <br />My hours are married to shadow. <br />No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel <br />On the blank stones of the landing.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-colossus/
