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
And it grows, the vain
summer,
even for us with our
bright green sins:
behold the dry guest,
the wind,
as it stirs up quarrels
among magnolia boughs
and plays its serene
tune on
the prows of all the leaves —
and then is gone,
leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air.
One spring day I saw
the shadow of a strawberry tree
lying on the moor
like a shy lamb asleep.
Its heart was far away,
suspended in the sky,
brown in a brown veil,
in the sun’ s eye.
The shadow played in the wind,
moving there alone
to make the tree content.
Here and there it shone.
It knew no pain, no haste,
wanting only to feel morning,
then noon, then the slow-paced
journey of evening.
Psychoanalysis
always looks for the egg
in a basket
that has been lost.
* * *
I sample sin as if it were
the beginning of well-being.
* * *
I don't like Paradise
as they probably don't have obsessions there.
* * *
If God absolves me
he always does so
for insufficient
evidence.
Let us honor the topmost banner
fluttering over the kingdom of commodities —
the encoded soul of price
rose of the name and name of the rose,
bundle of stems, fasces
of tendons and veins —
wrist on which
to auscultate
the pulse of money.
