For Sylvia Plath
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief -
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the d**h I wanted so badly and for so long,
the d**h we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the d**h that talked of an*lysts and cures,
the d**h that talked like brides with plots,
the d**h we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes d**h again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know at the news of your d**h
a terrible taste for it, like salt,
(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with d**h again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,
what is your d**h
but an old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!