PRACTICAL COURSE

IN LITERATURE STUDIES

A READER
Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)

Song of Myself

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green

stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

17
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.

Emily Dickinson
(1839-1886) 119
I dwell in Possibility --
14 A fairer House than Prose --
I died for Beauty -- but was scarce More numerous of Windows --
Adjusted in the Tomb Superior -- for Doors --
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room -- Of Chambers as the Cedars --
Impregnable of Eye --
He questioned softly "Why I failed"? And for an Everlasting Roof
"For Beauty", I replied -- The Gambrels of the Sky –
"And I -- for Truth -- Themself are One --
We Brethren, are", He said -- 580
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night -- And Mourners to and fro
We talked between the Rooms -- Kept treading -- treading -- till it seemed
Until the Moss had reached our lips -- That Sense was breaking through --
And covered up -- our names --
And when they all were seated,
Of Visitors -- the fairest -- A Service, like a Drum --
For Occupation -- This -- Kept beating -- beating -- till I thought
The spreading wide of narrow Hands My Mind was going numb --
To gather Paradise --
And then I heard them lift a Box
34 And creak across my Soul
There's a certain Slant of light, With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Winter Afternoons -- Then Space -- began to toll,
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -- As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -- And I, and Silence, some strange Race
We can find no scar, Wrecked, solitary, here --
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are -- And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down --
None may teach it -- Any -- And hit a World, at every plunge,
'Tis the Seal Despair -- And Finished knowing -- then --
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -- 612
A Word dropped careless on a Page
When it comes, the Landscape listens -- May stimulate an eye
Shadows -- hold their breath -- When folded in perpetual seam
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance The Wrinkled Maker lie
On the look of Death –
Infection in the sentence breeds
We may inhale Despair
At distances of Centuries
From the Malaria --
 T.S. Eliot
(1888-1965)
The Waste Land
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt
deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no
relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth
garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the
Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this
card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his
back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a
ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William
Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him,
crying: 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your
garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this
year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! Hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, -
mon frère!'
William Carlos Williams
(1993-1963)

Portrait of a Lady

YOUR thighs are appletrees

whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze--or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
--as if that answered
anything. Ah, yes--below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore--
Which shore?--
the sand clings to my lips--
Which shore? Danse Russe
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know? IF when my wife is sleeping
Which shore? Which shore? and the baby and Kathleen
I said petals from an appletree. are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
The Red Wheelbarrow if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
so much depends before my mirror
upon waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
a red wheel "I am lonely, lonely.
barrow I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
glazed with rain If I admire my arms, my face,
water my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,--
beside the white Who shall say I am not
chickens. the happy genius of my household?
Robert Penn Warren
(1905-1989)
Audabon
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.
I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse.  I heard them.
I did not know what was happening in my
heart.
....and I longed to know the world's
name."*
*“American Portrait Old Style-Now and
Then”
Bearded Oaks
The oaks, how subtle and marine,
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.
So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light:
The grasses, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.
Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.
Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour:
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.
The storm of noon above us rolled,
Of light and fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Dark is unrocking, unrippling, still.
Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
Descend, minutely whispering down,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.
All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage, the rage of stone;
If hope is hopeless, then fearless fear,
And history is thus undone.
Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
At windows, once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping, fled.
I do not love you less that now
The caged heart makes iron stroke,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke.
We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for eternity.
Ezra Pound
(1885 – 1972)
Canto 1 Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
And then went down to the ship, Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, Unwept, unwrapped in the sepulchre, since
and toils urged other.
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also "Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark
Heavy with weeping, and winds from coast?
sternward "Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?"
Bore us onward with bellying canvas, And he in heavy speech:
Crice's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. "Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Crice's
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the ingle.
tiller, "Going down the long ladder unguarded,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till "I fell against the buttress,
day's end. "Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean, Avernus.
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, "But thou, O King, I bid remember me,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities unwept, unburied,
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced "Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and
ever inscribed:
With glitter of sun-rays "A man of no fortune, and with a name to
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from come.
heaven "And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men (…)
there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to
the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip IN A STATION OF THE METRO
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed
with white flour
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly
death's-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-
sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of
brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more
beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead, Robert Lowell
Till I should hear Tiresias.
(1917-1977)
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Skunk Hour under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her I stand on top
Spartan cottage; of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
her sheep still graze above the sea. a mother skunk with her column of kittens
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer swills the garbage pail.
is first selectman in our village; She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
she's in her dotage. of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
Thirsting for
the hierarchie privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--

we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned
down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the
town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,

"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here—

only skunks, that search Elizabeth Bishop

in the moonlight for a bite to eat. (1911-1979)
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire The Armadillo
 and panic, and a weak mailed fist
This is the time of year clenched ignorant against the sky!
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint

still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light

that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard

to tell them from the stars --
planets, that is -- the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,

they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly

and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.

It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up

and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.

Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,

short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! -- a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!

O falling fire and piercing cry Denise Levertov
(1923-1997)
In Mind
There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but

fair-featured, and smelling of

apples or grass.  She wears

a utopian smock or shift, her hair

is light brown and smooth, and she

is kind and very clean without

ostentation---
              but she has
no imagination.
               And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,

dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,

who knows strange songs---

but she is not kind.

To the Snake

Green Snake, when I hung you round my neck

and stroked your cold, pulsing throat
as you hissed to me, glinting
arrowy gold scales, and I felt
the weight of you on my shoulders,
and the whispering silver of your dryness
sounded close at my ears --

Green Snake--I swore to my companions that certainly

you were harmless! But truly
I had no certainty, and no hope, only desiring
to hold you, for that joy,
which left
a long wake of pleasure, as the leaves moved
and you faded into the pattern
of grass and shadows, and I returned
smiling and haunted, to a dark morning.

Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above   
Robert Creeley
the others to me
(1926-2005)
important because all
For Love
that I know derives crossed legs with skirt, or   
from what it teaches me.    soft body under
Today, what is it that    the bones of the bed.
is finally so helpless,
Nothing says anything   
different, despairs of its own    but that which it wishes   
statement, wants to would come true, fears   
turn away, endlessly what else might happen in
to turn away.
some other place, some   
If the moon did not ... other time not this one.   
no, if you did not A voice in my place, an   
I wouldn’t either, but    echo of that only in yours.
what would I not
Let me stumble into
do, what prevention, what    not the confession but   
thing so quickly stopped.    the obsession I begin with   
That is love yesterday    now. For you
or tomorrow, not
also (also)
now. Can I eat some time beyond place, or   
what you give me. I place beyond time, no   
have not earned it. Must    mind left to
I think of everything
say anything at all,
as earned. Now love also    that face gone, now.
becomes a reward so Into the company of love   
remote from me I have it all returns.
only made it with my mind.
I Know a Man
Here is tedium,
despair, a painful As I sd to my
sense of isolation and    friend, because I am
whimsical if pompous always talking, -- John, I

self-regard. But that image    sd, which was not his

is only of the mind’s name, the darkness sur-
vague structure, vague to me    rounds us, what
because it is my own.
can we do against
Love, what do I think it, or else, shall we &
to say. I cannot say it. why not, buy a goddamn big car,
What have you become to ask,   
what have I made you into, drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
companion, good company,    out where yr going.
Allen Ginsberg  
(1926-1997)
 Howl

I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural
darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light
tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows
of the skull, (…)

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and
imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming
under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the
heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress
of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch
the stunned governments! (…)

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

         where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
         where you must feel strange (…)
I'm with you in Rockland
         where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over
the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls
collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here   O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
         in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in
tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Anne Sexton
(1928-1974)

Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman

My daughter, at eleven But before they enter
(almost twelve), is like a garden. I will have said,
Oh, darling! Born in that sweet birthday suit Your bones are lovely,
and having owned it and known it for so long, and before their strange hands
now you must watch high noon enter - there was always this hand that formed.
noon, that ghost hour. Oh, darling, let your body in,
Oh, funny little girl – this one under a blueberry sky, let it tie you in,
this one! How can I say that I've known in comfort.
just what you know and just where you are? What I want to say, Linda,
It's not a strange place, this odd home is that women are born twice.
where your face sits in my hand If I could have watched you grow
so full of distance, as a magical mother might,
so full of its immediate fever. if I could have seen through my magical transparent
The summer has seized you, belly,
as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw there would have been such a ripening within:
lemons as large as your desk-side globe - your embryo,
that miniature map of the world - the seed taking on its own,
and I could mention, too, life clapping the bedpost,
the market stalls of mushrooms bones from the pond,
and garlic buds all engorged. thumbs and two mysterious eyes,
Or I think even of the orchard next door, the awfully human head,
where the berries are done the heart jumping like a puppy,
and the apples are beginning to swell. the important lungs,
And once, with our first backyard, the becoming -
I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans while it becomes!
we couldn't eat. as it does now,
Oh, little girl, a world of its own,
my stringbean, a delicate place.
how do you grow? I say hello
You grow this way. to such shakes and knockings and high jinks,
You are too many to eat. such music, such sprouts,
I hear such dancing-mad-bears of music,
as in a dream such necessary sugar,
the conversation of the old wives such goings-on!
speaking of womanhood. Oh, little girl,
I remember that I heard nothing myself. my stringbean,
I was alone. how do you grow?
I waited like a target. You grow this way.
Let high noon enter – You are too many to eat.
the hour of the ghosts. What I want to say, Linda,
Once the Romans believed is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
that noon was the ghost hour, All that is new is telling the truth.
and I can believe it, too, I'm here, that somebody else,
under that startling sun, an old tree in the background.
and someday they will come to you, Darling,
someday, men bare to the waist, young Romans stand still at your door,
at noon where they belong, sure of yourself, a white stone, a good stone -
with ladders and hammers as exceptional as laughter
while no one sleeps. you will strike fire,
that new thing!
Adrienne Rich
(b. 1929)
Diving Into the Wreck
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
abroad the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or week
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare
beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
and I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
Obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Snapshots Of A Daughter-In-Law

1
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,

heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter

wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

8
"You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,
and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we might have been,
all that we were--fire, tears,
wit, taste, martyred ambition--
stirs like the memory of refused adultery
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

10
Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.
Sylvia Plath
(1932-1963)

Lady Lazarus It was an accident.

I have done it again.
One year in every ten The second time I meant
I manage it----- To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade, As a seashell.
My right foot They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky
A paperweight, pearls.
My featureless, fine
Jew linen. Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
Peel off the napkin I do it exceptionally well.
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?------- I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? I guess you could say I've a call.
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day. It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
Soon, soon the flesh It's the theatrical
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same
And I a smiling woman. brute
I am only thirty. Amused shout:
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
'A miracle!'
This is Number Three. That knocks me out.
What a trash There is a charge
To annihilate each decade.
For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
What a million filaments. For the hearing of my heart---
The Peanut-crunching crowd It really goes.
Shoves in to see
And there is a charge, a very large charge
Them unwrap me hand and foot ------ For a word or a touch
The big strip tease. Or a bit of blood
Gentleman , ladies
Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
These are my hands So, so, Herr Doktor.
My knees. So, Herr Enemy.
I may be skin and bone,
I am your opus,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical I am your valuable,
woman. The pure gold baby
The first time it happened I was ten.
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great Ariel
concern.
Stasis in darkness.
Ash, ash--- Then the substanceless blue
You poke and stir. Pour of tor and distances.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---- God's lioness,
How one we grow,
A cake of soap, Pivot of heels and knees! - The furrow
A wedding ring, Splits and passes, sister to
A gold filling. The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Herr God, Herr Lucifer Nigger-eye
Beware Berries cast dark
Beware. Hooks -
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Out of the ash Shadows.
I rise with my red hair Something else
And I eat men like air. Hauls me through air -
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel -
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
 (b. 1952)

Rita Dove

POEM IN WHICH I REFUSE CONTEMPLATION

A letter from my mother was waiting:

read in standing, one a.m.,
just arrived at my German mother-in-law
six hours from Paris by car.
Our daughter hops on Oma's bed,
happy to be back in a language
she knows. Hello, all! Your postcard
came on the nineth—familiar misspelled
words, exclamations. I wish my body
wouldn't cramp and leak; I want to—
as my daughter says, pretending to be
"Papa"—pull on boots and go for a long walk
alone. Your cousin Ronnie in D.C.—
remember him?—he was the one
a few months younger than you—
was strangulated at some chili joint,
your Aunt May is beside herself!
Mom skips to the garden which is
producing—onions, swiss chard,
lettuce, lettuce, lettuce, turnip greens and more lettuce
so far! The roses are flurishing.

Missing                

I am the daughter who went out with the girls,

never checked back in and nothing marked my "last
known whereabouts," not a single glistening petal.

Horror is partial; it keeps you going. A lost

child is a fact hardening around its absence,
a knot in the breast purring Touch, and I will

come true. I was "returned," I watched her

watch as I babbled It could have been worse. . . .
Who can tell
what penetrates? Pity is the brutal
discipline. Now I understand she can never
die, just as nothing can bring me back--

I am the one who comes and goes;

I am the footfall that hovers.
Your choice