Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.


Sylvia Plath

Morning, Casa Lanzarotti

 After we distilled out the oil, we put thousands of kilos of old lavender into the cows' stable. The whole farm smelled like lavender for days.

Douglas, Isle of Man

 We stayed in a Victorian-era boarding house constructed for the hordes of lower class northern English people who used to spend holidays on the Isle of Man. Now there are almost no tourists on the island, and you can easily get lost wandering the back hallways of the vast old hotels.

Cold morning, Podere Campriano

 On the few days when the ground wasn't frozen, the mud was deeper than knee-high boots.

February mornings, Podere Campriano

 Above: beautiful hot milk, the reward for getting up at dawn and undergoing two cold, hay-dusty hours of milking and feeding

There is a sign on the long dirt road to the property that warns hunters of the Podere's three dogs. "That's good, that way the hunters won't get near and accidentally shoot your dogs," I said to Claudio. "No," said Claudio, "It's so that the hunters don't get near, because if they do, our dogs will eat their dogs." And in fact there are corpses of deer and skeletons of sheep all over the property.

Breakfast for a grandparent, 2012