Meinke - The contracted world: new & more selected poems

The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled, like Blake's... from Sylvia Plath's Death & Co. I We must be careful whom we choose for inspiration or the muse may turn upon us like an alien that eats its victims from within II ... eyes rolling inward see round curve of skull the egg the blank dome screen with the nerves in pattern like razorcuts over the bones of those who yearned to be good but never understood their mothers husbands wives whose lives boiling in loneliness burned and sputtered against the wall where the innocent and cruel line up before the state's wrath the dogs of love the invisible worm the mad blind muse of Sylvia Plath... III Happy poems are hardest because you come off like a dog wagging its tail instead of a worried soul who reads the papers and inhales the flaws: the brutalization of the frail starvation and pustulant disease nature still red in tooth and claw whipping us daily How weary, stale,flat and unprofitable are these hours days and years we stare across And yet should we therefore fail to see the young so very pleased to be themselves? I say Praise without pause a damaged world deserving our applause