Staring at a Photo of Sylvia Plath on Her Paris Honeymoon, 1956

(written for LSP's "Ode to the Female Poet" competition)


I am looking down on you, my love,
and quite sad among the quiet.
I see God in your eyes,
God is the light around you,

the halo that is your shoulders,
rib-cage, soft pockmark of your belly
in a lush tweed wave crowning
the midnight beach.

It has grown cold outside, too cold,
for the fingers weep and freeze
in place. I would wish to sit
and smoke, efface my eyes in such
a vapor, so I might never see again.

But there is a chill that bites,
gnaws at the bone the way
your own eyes do in their
glory cloak of sepia-bled feathers.
They flash and burn at me,

flames-of-eye hands probing me quick,
robbing me of the splendor of my quiet.
My peace has grown sad,
now it is empty.

I can feel the fall, soft ball resting
at my elbow, furry as the cat.
It warms over me slowly, a gradual
thickening kiss. It tastes nostalgic
and bitter, it makes me cringe.

The patches are falling off me,
serenade of dead lead flakes.
I would laugh at my ordeal, if laughing
would not stir the unbreakable waters,

infinitely fragile, infinitesimal,
a string of fingers held up by your
stars, delicate as ice crystals come
to shatter my breast.

I would have touched you in silence.
But then we must kiss in silence,
lie still like walls in this abeyance,
grow even more still, fluttering
wide-eyed at marble flower feet.

We only wish to converse with gods,
they're no less substantial entities
than fire and ice, our hybrid elements.
Passing on the street, I would have
watched you, pacing flaring willow-tree,

your restraint no less incandescent,
catching sparks on fringed lashes.
Then the currents of our soul's mesmeric
trances would have fallen into step,
whispering, breath to breath, a decayed
alleyway of distance. The vast avenue
of shopping lists and hollow filmy tears,
straining its hands like a leaf-strewn
cradle, the abysmal chiasmic embrace.

In these, the Disintegration of Memory,
dehumanization of humans, photography
of light and gestures, we are one.

If you would only let me in, I would claw
at the ground to rest beside you, for
your dust to warm mine, oven to earth oven,
a memory kiss of clay fire, hands closing
over vine of petal worms, secret nudgings.

I have never loved a woman, but then you
knew you were never one to begin with.
You are not me, though you might have been,
but I was never you. There can exist summer
or spring, autumn or fall, but there is only
one winter. I love in you all that is listless,
all that creeps to be but dies upon the echo
of force. I love your lips and hands,

your grace, glazed-water happiness. You, most
magical of Illusion Girls, I walk drunk
on the hallucination that was you, dead
and passed, still cloying about these mechanical
hothouse walls. Still and grieving,
a shivering elixir rotting me into two pieces
of stagnancy, a most topsy-turvy stasis.


link to Plath's "Lady Lazarus":

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178961