All night long I hear the sleepers toss
Between the darkened window and the wall.
The madman’ s whimper and the lover’ s voice,
The worker’ s whisper and the sick child’ s call —
Knowing them all
I’ d walk a mile, maybe, hearing some cat
Crying its guts out, to throttle it by hand,
Such simple love I had. I wished I might —
Or God might — answer each call in person and
Each poor demand.
Love not too much. But how,
When thou hast made me such,
And dost thy gifts bestow,
How can I love too much?
Though I must fear to lose,
And drown my joy in care,
With all its thorns I choose
The path of love and prayer.
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
Wind whistling, as it does
in winter, and I think
nothing of it until
it snaps a shutter off
her bedroom window, spins
it over the roof and down
to crash on the deck in back,
like something out of Oz.
We look up, stunned — then glad
to be safe and have a story,
characters in a fable
we only half-believe.
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.
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?
This is the best —
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso —
maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins —
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,
dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,
In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents are buried
side by side beneath a slab of smoothgranite.
Then, all day, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.
Let’ s make believe
I am happy, I laugh
Black poison, all of me
Its bottleful,
Become sparkling water
My cup runneth over
I am your son
You are my daughter,
The only one
I Google myself
I want you to love me
When I feel down
I want you to Google me
I search myself
I want you to find me
I Google myself
I want you to remind me
I don’ t Google anybody else
When I think about you
I Google myself
Ooh
I don’ t Google anybody else
At home alone in the middle of the night
I Google myself
I Google myself
And see you before me
Any fool could see
Just how much I Google myself
Get down on your knees &
Friend me and Poke me
