Ariel
They will warn you about
Sylvia Plath, she went insane and killed herself. Van Gogh, Nerval...
She’s better than any
of her critics, which is the unfailingly correct relationship. Robert Lowell qua
critic loses his internal combustion engine on the highway: “These poems
are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder... they tell
that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it.” Mind you, he
recoups. “Somehow none of it sank very deep into my awareness... never
guessed her later appalling and triumphant fulfillment.”
I’m
no more your mother
Than
the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement
at the wind’s hand.
If you do not care to admit
the life as caricatured, the work stands clear. Else were we all Drs. So-and-Such,
round reflectors (each with a hole) to our brows, standing at the foot of her
bed in a vaudeville sketch, reading her chart and moo-mooing. There is no
patient.
The
engine is killing the track, the track is silver,
It
stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless.
*
I
am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms.
And
in truth it is terrible,
Multiplied
in the eyes of the flies.
They
buzz like blue children
In
nets of the infinite,
Roped
in at the end by the one
Death
with its many sticks.
*
People
or stars
Regard
me sadly, I disappoint them.
*
It
is they who own me.
Neither
cruel nor indifferent,
Only
ignorant.
*
My
Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,
May
be pinned any minute, anaesthetized.
And
here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed
in steam.
The
blood jet is poetry,
There
is no stopping it.
You
hand me two children, two roses.