Visiting Sylvia
Spring in London, the cathedrals
emptying their verdant shadows at my feet, the city
nodding under dogwood, and that book of poems
I paid six pounds for, sharp and red,
faber and faber’s compact oblong
shining like the silk of a lipsticked mouth,
your tulips, tiger-throated, keeling over the cover –
the only jewel I couldn’t quite resist.
See how I still hold you to my heart.
When I learned you, breathless, your blood
pounding in my ears (I am, iamb) my hunger
for hard sharp things surpassed everything.
With you I knew the cut of bone, the hot
long vaporous passage into rapture. A blaze, a lucifer –
the sting, the catalogue of vital monsters.
Rapt, the both of us lay down to it,
the world’s ineffable heat. And we said,
God of the knife, make this of me,
electric, potent with voltage. Let the blood
spread richly over the surface of the sea,
let the gleaming instruments make something of us.
Life, beat me into the shape of a poet.
But see how I cannot hate like you.
It is a kind of splendid coldness –
how lucky you were, how you made your pieces fit,
smudged your thesaurus with a bloodied thumb.
How you made everybody come and do your bidding,
stuck each in his place around you –
the scarlet-edged petals
of your hot-tongued flower. Burn and burn, Electra,
and hurt yourself into beauty, your sizzle of hell-flames.
Everything suits you, and you lie, exultant,
the white body, the cruel soul, your hair
aflame, your thick American lips set, suddenly: the lips of an idol.
Your father, black with Auschwitz soot; your mother,
and her fat placenta, and your husband
whose flesh you’ve rent before, all stand –
your chorus, your chosen. See how I begin to hate you.
You would say I haven’t the guts
to follow you, the earnest “I am”
of your heart. Paralyzed at the threshhold,
knife poised, instruments polished,
I can cut nobody but me.
These incisions are scratches, and laughable.
In his seersucker suit, daddy chews his tobacco.
I can’t help but laugh when my mother scowls. My lovers
take me bowling, and the only wounds
their cheeks bear come from shaving. Altogether
I’ve failed you. I spin, pure and impure,
no secrets here, mister. The peanut-crunching crowd
won’t gawk at my daily incandescence.
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