Ariel: The Restored Edition Read Free Page B

imagine myself with a great public,
    Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.
    Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen.
    The moon lays a hand on my forehead,
    Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.
     

Lady Lazarus
     
     
    I have done it again.
    One year in every ten
    I manage it——
     
    A sort of walking miracle, my skin
    Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
    My right foot
     
    A paperweight,
    My face a featureless, fine
    Jew linen.
     
    Peel off the napkin
    O my enemy.
    Do I terrify?——
     
    The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
    The sour breath
    Will vanish in a day.
     
    Soon, soon the flesh
    The grave cave ate will be
    At home on me
     
    And I a smiling woman.
    I am only thirty.
    And like the cat I have nine times to die.
     
    This is Number Three.
    What a trash
    To annihilate each decade.
     
    What a million filaments.
    The peanut-crunching crowd
    Shoves in to see
     
    Them unwrap me hand and foot——
    The big strip tease.
    Gentlemen, ladies
     
    These are my hands
    My knees.
    I may be skin and bone,
     
    Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
    The first time it happened I was ten.
    It was an accident.
     
    The second time I meant
    To last it out and not come back at all.
    I rocked shut
     
    As a seashell.
    They had to call and call
    And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
     
    Dying
    Is an art, like everything else.
    I do it exceptionally well.
     
    I do it so it feels like hell.
    I do it so it feels real.
    I guess you could say I’ve a call.
     
    It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
    It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
    It’s the theatrical
     

    Comeback in broad day
    To the same place, the same face, the same brute
    Amused shout:
     
    ‘A miracle!’
    That knocks me out.
    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.
    So, so, Herr Doktor.
    So, Herr Enemy.
     
    I am your opus,
    I am your valuable,
    The pure gold baby
     
    That melts to a shriek.
    I turn and burn.
    Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
     
    Ash, ash——
    You poke and stir.
    Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
     
    A cake of soap,
    A wedding ring,
    A gold filling.
     
    Herr God, Herr Lucifer
    Beware
    Beware.
     
    Out of the ash
    I rise with my red hair
    And I eat men like air.
     

Tulips
     
     
    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