Sylvias Death

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 death I wanted so badly and for so long, the death 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 death that talked of analysts and cures, the death that talked like brides with plots, the death we drank to, the motives and the quiet deed? (In Boston the dying ride in cabs, yes death 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 death a terrible taste for it, like salt, (And me, me too.

And now,

Sylvia, you again with death again, that ride home with our boy.) And I say only with my arms stretched out into that stone place, what is your death 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!