prikedelik doc #3


 

sylvia plath:

the colossus.

qui per la traduzione in italiano


i shall never get you put together entirely
pieced, gluted, and properly jointed.
mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
proceed from your great lips.
it's worse than a barnyard.

perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
muothpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
thirty years now i have labored
to dredge the silt from your throat.
i am none the wiser.

scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol
i crawl like an ant in mourning
over the weedy acres of your brow
to mend the immense skull-plates and clear
the bald, white tumuli of yours eyes.

a blue sky out of the oresteia
arches above us. o father, all by yourself
you are pithy and historical as the roman forum.
i open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
your fluted and acanthine hair are littered

in their old anarchy to the orizon-line.
it would take more than a lightning-stroke
to create such a ruin.
nights, i squat in the cornucopia
of 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 keel
on the blank stones of the landing.

1959


da le muse inquitanti, di sylvia platt, mondadori 1985


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