Sylvia

Sylvia Plath,
I went in for Ariel
(which I had owned at one point,
from the Strand, a four dollar copy
same as The Wasteland which I’d
bought around the same time).
The copy in stock was hardcover, glossy,
but there next to it were your collected works,
1956-1963,
poems you’d written right up until that final cold February
just days before my birthday that you stuck your head in the oven.

You were thirty.
You had two children.
Your husband left you for another woman
because you couldn’t fix yourself
and when she couldn’t fix herself
he didn’t leave but she went out
in a similar manner,
no doubt inspired by the precedent you’d set.

I try to calculate how may poems you wrote
between twenty six and thirty one
and how many I’ve written up to now
and how they’d stack up
and wonder about my failure of imagination
desperate for images less literal,
trying to build a mythology to stand the test of time,
the classroom analysis,
worthy of footnotes.

I wonder at the backhanded compliments I’ve received over the years:
from Devon, “Chris could cook circles around you,
but he’s unreliable. I need someone I can count on.”

Ted Hughes said Sylvia never scrapped a poem once written.
She approached her writing with an artisan dedication--
if she couldn’t make a table, she’d settle for a chair,
an ottoman, an end table. Sylvia Plath?

What does that leave me?
Poems like whittled spoons for stirring beans over camp fires?
Bent brass door handles fitted over the steel drum body of a bullet smoker?
Glued together mugs full of pencils and wooden beads,
an old triumph badge and bent safety pins?

I might as well stick my head in an oven at that rate.
Just to see, of course--they’re all electric anyway,
but it’s my ego that keeps me from the full go--
is there any dignified way to go out?
Chicken legs at obscene angles half in half out the oven door?
The crushing splay of rushing pavement and the gawking crowds?
The liquid evacuation following the kicked out chair?
The choking blue, the foaming mouth, the aspiration of vomit?

No, no,
I won’t be convinced,
just stick to silly little love songs,
free form literalism
and call it a hobby.
Nevermind.
A drop in the ocean
with no room for more.