I dated mostly police.
I hated coastal solace.
In navy posts I flourished.
I inflate the cost of polish.
I restrained my nest-egg worries.
On planes I tested patience.
I prayed for lusty follies.
I betrayed my foster family.
In ways I lost my malice.
I craved a cloistered palace.
I dared say the feast was ghoulish.
I became a tourist: boorish.
Unswayed by mystic knowledge,
I raised a frosty chalice.
I was upstaged and roasted: English.
I obeyed a ghost who’ s tall-ish.
If one takes
a walk on a clear sunny
day in middle April,
when the first
willows are in bloom,
one may often see
young bumblebee queens
eagerly sipping
nectar from the catkins —
thus begins
the one book written
by Otto Emil Plath.
It is a delightful thing
to pause and watch
these queens, clad
The damselfly folds its wings
over its body when at rest. Captured,
it should not be killed
in cyanide, but allowed to die
slowly: then the colors,
especially the reds and blues,
will last. In the hand
it crushes easily into a rosy
slime. Its powers of flight
are weak. The trout
He started with the tune his mother had hummed
in Ohio, nostalgia he’ d carried for years,
and by Sunday afternoon he had the words.
A triumph, already; he whistled the banjo’ s part.
(Himself a sympathizer from the North,
called copperhead, called traitor by his own kin.)
Something lively, some git-up-and-git they’ d wanted
and didn’ t he deliver —
Miss Susan got seven encores the first night.
That gave them their tune, their Negro walk-around —
After the cling of roots and then the “pock”
when they gave way
the recoil up the hand
was a small shock
of emptiness beginning to expand.
Milk frothing from the stems. Leaves inky green
and spiked.
Like blissed-out childhood play
turned mean
they snarled in tangled curls on our driveway.
On the day we moved in, the pings, bumps, and snaps
Were scary, it's true, but probably normal;
A house accepting new patterns of weight
With protest, the way no conviction goes gently.
We laughed a little, and called it "our spirit."
Later that night, when the power conked out
And the kids were crying, the ghost got a name,
"Daniel," and a history of whispered exploits,
All of them harmless, like nursery rhymes,
Or like the little fibs we tell ourselves
To explain why this or that has led to suffering.
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees, —
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades, —
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
The sun that puts its spokes in every
Wheel of manhandle and tree
Derives its path of seashines
(Sheer centrifugality) from my
Regards. I send it
My regards. Some yards
Of lumen from the fabrika
Have come unbolted from the look
Of it (or likes of me), a long
Unweaving or recarding I
Cannot recall begun, and there
Before my eyes a palm
Puts lashes round the sun.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires — and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings — the huts,
