English Poems

Nature, which is the vast creation’ s soul,
That steady curious agent in the whole,
The art of Heaven, the order of this frame,
Is only number in another name.
For as some king conqu’ ring what was his own,
Hath choice of several titles to his crown;
So harmony on this score now, that then,
Yet still is all that takes and governs men.
Beauty is but composure, and we find
Content is but the concord of the mind,
Friendship the unison of well-turned hearts,
Honor the chorus of the noblest parts,

’ Tis now since I began to die
Four months, yet still I gasping live;
Wrapp’ d up in sorrow do I lie,
Hoping, yet doubting a reprieve.
Adam from Paradise expell’ d
Just such a wretched being held.

’ Tis not thy love I fear to lose,
That will in spite of absence hold;
But ’ tis the benefit and use
Is lost, as in imprison’ d gold:
Which though the sum be ne’ er so great,
Enriches nothing but conceit.

Lots of contemporaries —
but “me” is not my contemporary.

My birth without “me”
was a blemished offering on the collection plate.
A moment of flesh, imprisoned in flesh.

And when to the tip of this tongue of flesh
some word comes, it kills itself.
If saved from killing itself,
it descends to the paper, where a murder happens.

Gunshot —
if it strikes me in Hanoi
it strikes again in Prague.

A little smoke floats up,
and my “me” dies like an eighth-month child.
Will my “me” one day be my contemporary?

A gust roused the waves,
leaves blew into the water,
the waves were ash-gray,
the sky tin-gray,
ash-gray the autumn.

It was good for my heart:
there my feelings were ash-gray,
the sky tin-gray,
ash-gray the autumn.

The breath of wind brought cooler air,
the waves of mourning brought separation:
autumn and autumn
befriend each other.

It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him — it didn’ t matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone — couldn’ t have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.

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

At the center of the lit circle, rising
from cotton-candy calf muscles,
the White Clown ushers his
eyebrows skyward. He grates his ukulele,
opens a heart-shaped mouth, inhales —
his serenade begins.

Now's the time. From the shadows,
a blast like a trumpeting elephant:
obscene, ragged. The Auguste capers like a fawn,
darts away, pads around
with his trombone. The gold of the slide
slips into and out of the infinite.

Always the evening noises, the footsteps on the stairs, the day that rises in the throat.
A turn of the key will expel the world.
Against the extinct forest of furniture, the channeled bloodstream translates the dream into this small life.

In the end we shrink until finally we can no longer inhabit the gestures of our childhood.

A nail in a board: the remains of a fence; blurred memory of the mountain that raised the tree, that brooded over its ore.

You're dreaming
of Cratoids, Armpullers, the Blownose Dragon.
Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, the girl
who comes looking for us tonight with her mosaic
of colored paper: her house
with its red roof, some trees on a green lawn,
the sky — outside, the concentration camp.
This is the real gift
I brought back from Prague without telling you.
It was with me on the train the morning
I thought I was living in hell: Stuttgart,
or south of there, amid a drone
of people working — they don't know at what

This is a year of poppies: our land
was brimming with them as May burned
into June and I returned —
a sweet dark wine that made me drunk.

From clouds of mulberry to grains to grasses
ripeness was all, in the fitting
heat, in the slow drowsiness spreading
through the universe of green.

My life half over I saw grown sons
setting off alone and vanishing from sight
beyond the prison the flight
of the swallow makes in the spent