[for Sylvia Plath]
"because their words had forked no lightening..."
=Dylan Thomas
how did it feel to write that way
dark side of the mirror to mirror's
sad back to back
expressive but incommunicado
scarcely published in the magazines
bypassing your intensity
was it
like falling down in daylight
with everyone watching you
wringing the light from your last pearls
princess, beekeeper of the denser luminosities-
in the fair far fairy tale woods can
you take the wrong turn
and get lost in the lostness
did you.
when she came with her basket
that last time (the witch) with her
pale green laces her used-up mythologies
her gold apple laced with a glimmering poison
how I wish you had slammed the door
in her face and not invited her in for pastries
and coffee.
oh, but you became a conduit
of darkness with the eyes of the seer
everywhere on the surface of
your peacock soul so blue and green
so gold and yet despairing
who vividly sees no road ahead
the bridge washed out-
the fog never lifting from the jeweled path
that could be.
who trained you to live without hope
mining your own ore to extinction;
weeping in every cell of the
honeycomb.
sharp-sheared, untimely in the rose gardens.
didn't anyone notice
you grieving there in your thin, bright dress
(quenching your wedding finery, Eurydice
all by yourself
in the choice that won't come back)
but the thieving oracles
you listened to
or, was it something someone said
lightly on a summer day, in passing,
not meaning it really, in the strawberry patch
by the side of a house
so that everything afterwards was
kaleidoscope smashed, no longer turning
except the one ardour for poetry
calling, Sylvia,
keeper of the lamp with the radioactive flair.
or was it something said again and again
and driven home in the chill and damp the subterfuge
or only the owl feather's drifting down
on you, the snowy owl when you
wished for snow instead and
to be washed in light like Christmas
but could not be. somehow. otherwise.
or was it a penchant for the rookery for
the raven's wing on no upswing, for the bleak days.
why couldn't you see so many times
there was a brightness about your head;
like a saint's aureole, it shows in old photographs
that cannot show that the falling down in daylight,
rainlight, goodbye, unbluebirded in a tower of dew
I am vanishing
my winnowed children in the greylight (she cried)-
blinded you instead, gleam after banished gleam
to any other outcome
or crook of the lightening's tree...
CHORUS (or what is left of it):
in the lousy kitchenette
the realms of your eyelids, Ladye, fluttered: "snow"
mary angela douglas 25 december 2013;revised 29 december 2013
Dear Reader:
Please look for light not darkness. Please hold onto hope even in dark moments.
God is real. Life is not only what it is in the moment. Please always hold on. Nothing is worth throwing your life away. Nothing.
God is with you.
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