Plath: Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

-Sylvia Plath

Misunderstood Sister

You’re an airhead, not a bimbo.

You have a helium-filled mind
connected by a breakable string
to a clown that keeps it down

until the coming of the Scissors
to set it frightfully free.

Heart, Not the Head

listen to the head not the heart
for consistency,
say the idiots.

thoughts traveling the head
never obey the traffic laws.
they run all the stop signs
ignore all the posted speed limits
and get into all kinds
of collisions.

but feel and listen
how the heart never swerves
its road of rhythm.

No simple life

No simple life. I refuse to live a life that I can understand. I would rather stare at my life as one does a sky full of stars. I want to engage in an obsessed inner monologue that jealously tries to match the richness of the open fan above me – the depth of its blackness, the keenness and countlessness of its lights – by turning its words away from the hungry, thirsty, busy, lazy, proud, injured, failing, succeeding, ugly, sexy demigod of the world, and turning instead to the infinitely huge meta-God inside my infinite smallness, whom I am at a loss to modify with an adjective. I want to intimidate myself like that.

Matilda’s Prophecy

One of the millions of floral descendants
thinks it springs from Jesse’s tree.
It is a visionary flower. It believes the first flower will come again
only when all of its descendants agree.
Its descendants do not agree;
the iris argues tall and blue, the marigold squat and yellow and smelly;
the lily bows and sings a scent sweet and low as the Odor of Sanctity,
while the Don Juan rose is red and reticent to give off an odor at all.

If there is one flower, it thinks, there will be one mind,
and the offspring of the ros of swich virtu will come again.

So it will set fire to the rural grass,
because grass most easily ignites.
Inflamed with a sense of justice
moth-eaten by jealousy,
the grass will rage against the other flowers,
kill them,
then die.

The monochrome moss that remains
will lift hosannas like heavy stones
to the sole flower.

Afraid of Art

Why am I afraid of art? Must be the smell of the oil artists use to thin the paint. Whenever I smell it – that is, every time I hear the word “art” – beauty and self-expression are the last particles to tickle the nose hairs of my memory.

First, I think of carnations. Then I think of hands curled over a rosary, withered at room temperature like old iceberg lettuce, and I shudder as if I am a nose all alone in the dark.

Must be that art is the physical remains of a thought, and the smell of oil paint is the smell of decay.

The Dawning

That shoot looked like any blade of grass.
Then, hearing springtime’s pitch pipe, it took a breath
And tried its first colors, vocalizing softly in pink,
then lengthening its phrases into purple and yellow.
The world of grass
Welcomed its first flower.

The bee wept at its feet,
And the gospel of pollen
Spread throughout the world.

The Elite Roses

“How sad to be grass,” said the roses
Advancing in their trellis careers.
“Of course,” said the roses at the top,
“They are silent because they are listening,
Listening to us,
And craving to make
The music of color.”
But who knows what the grass was really thinking?
Who among the rich roses actually cared
What the silent grass was thinking?

Roosevelt: Betrayal

If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault. -Eleanor Roosevelt

Revisiting

Revisiting what we’ve already learned
Is normal and is nothing to regret;
After all, what we’ve already learned
Is what we are most likely to forget.