Improv - Week 5

Sylvia Plath's "The Colossus" (Contemporary American Poetry)

I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.

* * * * * * * *

Graduation 

I watch carefully. Closely.

A mother with dyed hair, thick like yours,

Wears a flowered shirt designed a decade or so ago.

She stands next to you, glasses in place

on a nose similar to yours.

She is where your stiff expression comes from,

the one I walked on eggshells for.

On your other side, tall and lank, he

smiles proudly behind his leathered face and spectacles

There I find your grotto-blue eyes

and your flashy dimples that won my smile in return.

Your humor is your father’s, not your mother’s.

I watch them and catch your laughter.

We smile a consolatory smile

as I see who you belong to.

And I wish I had known back then.

Your mother’s attention drawn in a scowl

as she turns to you. There is a huddled moment

before she looks at me, brow softening pity.

It would have made all the difference, you see,

if you had just introduced us.

She would know more of me than just a look,

and I - I would have never doubted

your motives, your love, your reasons

All the things you compartmentalized.

I see, through the crowded party, more of you

than I ever knew. It is fruitless to waste wishes

on things that cannot be changed.

I was cheated. They were misguided.

Yours are the parents I never knew.