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The ColossusRelated Poem Content DetailsBY SYLVIA PLATHI shall never get you put together entirely,Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cacklesProceed from your great lips.It’s worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.Thirty years now I have laboredTo dredge the silt from your throat.I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysolI crawl like an ant in mourningOver the weedy acres of your browTo mend the immense skull plates and clearThe bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of the OresteiaArches above us. O father, all by yourselfYou are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.It would take more than a lightning-strokeTo create such a ruin.Nights, I squat in the cornucopiaOf your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.My hours are married to shadow.No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keelOn the blank stones of the landing.
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