Reading Plath

Outside in the forest –
the night crickets of South Africa chime precisely,
like small xylophones,
into the luxurious night –
while fluting tree-frogs
colour the air deep black, and
night pools richly around the house.

Indoors, reclining,
but not at ease
she stills her mind –
its jarring images competing
like mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces
clamouring to be made part of a whole –
feel the Faber & Faber book,
anchor-steady in her hand.

Bravely, the light from the bedside lamp
reaches between the stiff formality of green silk curtains –
grasps darkness,
making of it,
something new.

A poem, from far away,
written in England, in another century,
flares and
ricochets across the rough page into consciousness,
like a bullet, finding its mark.
1956. ‘Firesong.’
‘brave love, dream
not of staunching such strict flame, but come,
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on’.

Plath’s rooks caw –
unappeased,
as she rages at the ragged American ocean
her grandmother left behind,
‘what is it
survives, grieves
so, over this battered, obstinate spit
of gravel? The waves’
spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,
grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.
a labour of love, and that labour lost.
steadily the sea
eats at Point Shirley’.

The words are powerful
enough
to reach beyond death.

No ‘blank untenanted air’
here,
from the mute November Graveyard
where Plath lies buried.

Rather – the air
she bequeathed
is as fecund as that of the night-time jungle in Africa –
sixty years on –
pulsing beyond the patient window.

Peopled with a wealth of words,
Coming, going,
Like spirits,
Like angels.

Like dreams
that elude
the woman who read Plath
lying there wide-eyed in the dark

with a mind
on fire.

21.8


References

‘Firesong’, ‘Point Shirley’, ‘November Graveyard’ are all from Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, London, 1990)

Cripple

Everything in his life
hinges now
on that minute, over so
quickly,
the gust took him,
blew him across the air, and
dumped him on the ground
– crumpled beneath his ‘chute
like a fistful of newspaper.

After they disentangled him,
after the hospital, the doctors,
the morphine, the pain –
the nightmares came,
waking him in the dark
gasping –
turned back on himself
like a embryo,
but one unable to grow
a new spine.

For her –
loving him is harder
than loving herself.

His wheelchair
comes between them.
Iron-wheeled, squat –
implacable as a gaoler,
while his jealousy fastens
limpet-like
on the backs of the men
who drift around her,
drones, waiting for their queen to
choose.

She wonders:
if he could take her properly
– show her who’s boss
– would it make him softer,
slower to impugn
her desire?

Yet – as she dances alone
at the jazz concert –
she keeps him in the
corner of her eye.
Seated, nursing a Savannah plugged with lemon.

Watches him
like sailors, finding their way at night,
might look up
as the stars above them
wheel and turn
– gleaming, celestial,
purer than the water that reflects them −

form a compass
to map
a way
home.

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