ALT Morning Song by Sylvia Plath: 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.

ALT Dream Song 1 by John Berryman Huffy Henry hid the day, unappeasable Henry sulked. I see his point,—a trying to put things over. It was the thought that they thought they could do it made Henry wicked & away. But he should have come out and talked. All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry's side. Then came a departure. Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don't see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived. What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear & be. Once in a sycamore I was glad all at the top, and I sang. Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed.

ALT When We Look Up by Denise Levertov He had not looked, pitiful man whom none pity, whom all must pity if they look into their own face (given only by glass, steel, water barely known) all who look up to see-how many faces? How many seen in a lifetime? (Not those that flash by, but those into which the gaze wanders and is lost and returns to tell Here is a mystery, a person, an other, an I?

ALT Celestial Estrangement by Philip Lamantia We have been carried here against our will Burnt stars Oceanic gardens where the clouds are soaked into my eyes How much sand floats in the teacup of your dreams The rivers you perceive are those of horses they carry red water the odor of imperishable sweat putrescent human bellies stuffed with revolvers and nuns At the top of the tower where hounds part with a pool of water where one comes only with a flaming lance where there is no escaping the pain of a horse’s kick where toy dolls are nailed to the beds where lovers suck their bodies dry as harp strings are plucked away in this hermit world of old gunny sacks and broken heads we encounter tons of wingless birds