A write-thru (italicized) of the Sylvia Plath poem, Colossus

*

Did she angle wonder on the grasp-
extending reason her creation
drove wild beyond loathing,
by constantly digging in hunt for sound
to knit rock-firm sharp pictures alive with
like a gem-stitched braid
upon what surface
her eye discerned a myriad of textural light?

Did her mind’s farthest anchor reach a coloured butterfly
wind-chanced and framed like a Japanese print
of bold delicacy
fittingly unambiguous in a mirror of detail
where every line rehearsed perfection
crisp as stalk-fresh shoots?

Nosed in did her compass net an imprint
of discordant shadow in savage butt and jagged
antinomy, absent of balance nature or measure

----------- write through---------

like a ruin of anarchy to the horizon line?
Did she mix thirty years of laboured hours
in little pails and gluepots
to create an oracle married in shadow?
Crawl like an ant over immense dead stones
in the black fluted night
and proceed to entirely open
the lightning sun with the skull of her brow as it rises?
Grunt cackle and glue the silt from her throat
to bray at Orestiea,
or some Roman mule god with acanthine hair
scaling the tumuli of bald acres under red hills?
Was she never counted by her father
or others, who
none the wiser
no longer listened
as she dredged her bawdy bones of mourning
and pieced together with blank eyes
her pithy historical mouthpiece
left to colour and stroke our ears? 

Could we perhaps lunch like barnyard pigs on the cornucopia of stars
which littered her tongue like lysol on clear white plates
climb ladders of weedy cypress jointed
by the wind of a blue sky arching above to
properly squat at some old forum and consider
landing keel and plum on the pillar of her great lips?

(Spring 2004, Ormskirk, Lancashire.)