July 6, 2003 The Path and the Plath Corseted woman poet-man On Ten Twenty Seven we were born you & me Maybe there you found me out Or worse for new angel you And into me you came Alas Saturn Now six years hence Sylvia Your boychild body is tired, girl Ó
Back porch ten-penny nails like worms popping up
When yesterday after your death I read
Your date of birth and
Knew it as my own.
Knew it as that omnipresent number
Which everywhere appears on clocks, car plates, maps, signs
Digital, flashing, frozen or set in stone
Ten Twenty Seven
Like that make & model of car a friend just bought
Hardly noticed before and
Now seen everywhere
Ten Twenty Seven.
You to live and die before I so much
As stirred among the stars
No, on Two Eleven Sixty Three I
With your little babies slept
While you adieu to the ghost of Yates did bid
And leapt from hollow edge
Into even night
To alight in aurora skies
Balmy and kind with loving words.
And knowing, touched your cooling lips to mine
Or like Ruth embraced me motherly
Before the blue light of painful birth
Tore sweet androgynous me
Again into the world of men.
You faltered or were turned back
Denied by reason of un-Catholic exit
And in that sped up time of movie Heaven
Sent to 1966
Nabbed by this newborn body of mine
Suckling for a sweet, sweet soul.
And you and I united, smiled more
Loved more
Wrote more
Sucked deeper of the marrow
Safer perhaps
In the unconscious armor
That is gender male.
That sinister nurse on psych ward rounds
Could not forever be put off.
Though you dodged most drastically once
She has returned for you
And thus for me
Ringed our Scorpio fire and
With bell jar descending
Cut off its vital breath.
You're drugged again
Dopey we dream and write in red
And the butterflies of social intercourse
Are thick in me as locusts
Threatening plague, delirium tremors
Or to overwhelm and carry us away
Drop us to our death
Unrequited, nameless, alone
But worst of all unread.
If in me you are true
Is this the path you once more choose?
To suffer victor Saturn
And so this pattern endless make?
He wonders how it got so late.
Write Me!
