The Black Shoes of Sylvia Plath
Monumental as tombstones
in an open field,
morbid as vacated coffins,
giving no hint to what filled
them
other than that their owner
desired to draw them;
lying abandoned and
inert as black ice,
awaiting what? Feet to step
into them
and take them to a better
place?
She wrote about them too:
“You do not do, you
do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like
a foot
For thirty years, poor and
white,
Barely daring to breathe
or Achoo.”
She depicted her daddy
as a black-hearted Nazi
who wanted her gassed as
a Jew,
whom twice she tried to get
back to,
the second time succeeding,
adieu.
Was her choice of gas symbolic
–
I’ll show you, Daddy,
I’ll co-opt your destruction of me --
or simply a matter of convenience
–
how commonplace to see a
60s housewife with her head in the oven?
Did she laugh as she freed
her self from her black-shod past?
Did she start to get giddy?
Did she kick off her shoes?
Did they land exactly as
she’d drawn them?
Those sentinels of denial,
those harbingers of unhappiness,
those crows battening on
her post mortem repute,
those “size-seven patent
leather shoes [she’d]
bought at Bloomingdale’s
one lunch hour
with a black patent leather
belt and black patent leather pocketbook
to match,” the summer
she interned at Mademoiselle,
for “the person in
The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby.”
Grizzly Man’s
Girlfriend
I let him take me into
green blackness where
I bathed in celestial
light
and ate berries left
by bears.
I let him take me into
the vast unknown where
I was drenched in sweat
and frozen in fear.
I let him take me into
a fragile tent where
I prayed I was safe
and found I was not.
I let him take me into
a land of giants where
a frying pan was my only
weapon
and it didn’t keep
me out of the fire.
I let him take me into
his dream of oblivion
where
we played at real life
and I now slumber in
the belly of a bear.
Failure
to Thrive
a response to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother”
Some mothers will not let
you thrive.
Oh, they’d give you
the keys to the car that you weren’t allowed to drive,
And damp, small recriminations
blotting out all hope,
Then remonstrances when,
as a result, you’d mope.
You will never resurrect
nor greet
Your dreams, nor be stoked
or assuaged with a teat.
You will never know what
depths to plumb
For ideas that will never
come.
You will never escape her,
no matter how blood-curdling your sigh,
Remaining as she snacks on
you, gobbling up her every lie.
I have heard in the television
airwaves the voice of my dim killed dreams.
I have spasmed, I have squeezed
My parched lips at the breasts
they would never suck.
She has said, “My dear,
if I erred, if I nipped your pluck
And your grasp from your
diminished reach,
If I stole your worth and
your joy, your delight in dating a boy,
Your desire to sing, to live
life on the wing, to hoot and holler, or just be,
If I poisoned the well of
your creativity,
Believe that even in my meanness
I was not mean.
When I tell you not to whine,
Since I believe the crime
was other than mine,
You claim that you are dead.
As if somehow instead
I had aborted you.
And that too, is true
And faulty: oh why couldn’t
you leave me alone,
You darling who gnawed on
my bone?
From the time you were born
you wanted from me
Naught that I had to give
-- not advice, not help, nor sympathy.
Believe me, I wanted you.
Where’s the knife?
Believe me, I wanted you
to fill the gaping hole in my life.
And you’ve let me considerably
down. Or would you prefer to drown?”
SOME NONSEXUAL SEXUAL POEMS
Virgin Bowling
Fingering the ball, probing
its unknown hole,
I reluctantly let go, then
watch the trajectory of
its passion to its explosive
finale,
white pins flashing in all
directions.
Static Electricity
I watch the brush wade through
her river of hair
creating shivers of expectation
as individual strands become
electrically
erect.
Box of Chalk
Pellets of radiant color
seductive as
a stimulating conversation
stumbled upon in a
neon-lit roadside tavern.
Stick Shift
Hot in my hand, responsive
to my desire,
it makes the car buck with
each thrust,
as I urge it to take
one sinuous curve after another.
Ski Slope
I drift lazily upwards like
a mosquito
seemingly without motivation,
secretly
drawn by hot blood, going
in for the kill,
down for the count, multiple
times.
Molasses
A slow puddle of molten desire
expands to subsume what is
called for,
the sticky excrescences of
diurnal yearning,
opening sweetly as just-baked
ginger snaps.
Fountain Pen
I fill its shaft with violet
ink
until it swells with purple
prose,
and bursts upon the virgin
page,
irrevocably staining it.
Dog Walker
Leaping eagerly to my embrace,
the bitch affirms her desire
is one with mine.
Straining at her spiked collar,
she pulls me
down the path of no return.
Chicken Breast
Pale pink and passive, the
breast
lies awaiting its release
from frigidity,
still, it gasps when it hits
the grill
even as it becomes plump,
white and juicy.
Peppermint
Brazen hussy in see-through
wrapper
reveals the rouge she’s
saucily spread
on her white physique, offering
no protest
as I suck on her until she’s
gone.
Finger Food
While one nervously awaits
the start
of something good, the waiter
comes
to the rescue, offering a
fine variety
of delectable options.
To My Husband on Veteran’s Day After 9/11
Watching the firemen
mount the steps
we wonder: if they had
known they were marching to their death
would they still have
climbed?
Certainly, even not knowing,
there was always a choice to flee or stay,
and they were considered
brave because they joined the fray.
But what about the boys
who had no heroic impulses,
who were drafted and
dropped in jungles that melted their flesh,
who were sprayed with
death from above,
and splattered by death
from below,
who could not stay and
could not go,
who were cursed and spat
upon when they got home,
no words of welcome,
not even the word, “heros,” misspelled in worshipful frenzy,
nothing but an abiding
silence that still rings in their ears?
I say to you, my husband,
you are the hero.
You did not flee the
country, nor seek 4-F.
You did your job
running twenty miles
in combat boots with youthful enthusiasm,
low-crawling through
enemy fire to get grenades with deadly determination,
(you got a Bronze Star
for that one)
and night patrolling
the perimeter with the insouciance of the damned.
You came home with tortured
skin, unable to sleep, plagued by doubt, but wearing medals,
to a changed world, and
only your dog came out to greet you
as you knelt in the dewy
grass of dawn and cried.
So, who is more the hero?
One who dies or one who endures?
Welcome home, my brother,
welcome home.
On Finding a Dead Bird
On the shrunken boards
of our deck
the bird lies, perfect
but eyeless
fallen prey perhaps to
West Nile Virus --
sightless in Gaza
gazeless in saga --
and I think,
“Death should be
more visible.”
In the palm of my hand
the bird feels weightless
ephemeral as a magician’s
trick --
sleight of hand
sleight of body --
and I think,
“Death should be
heavier.”
In the baggie I have
placed it
the bird melts into a
dark sludge
crawling with maggots
--
ABCs in a child’s
primordial soup
of deoxyribonucleic acid
and I think,
“Death should be
more comprehensible.”
While I ponder its disposal
the maggots and sludge
disappear
and the ensuing vacuum
shrink-wraps the bird’s remains inside the baggie
an astronaut’s
pouch of bones and feathers, hold the gravy.
Plastic is today’s
amber preserving itself forever
and I think,
“Death should last
longer.”
6o of Separation
I walk in a cathedral
of endless snow
with stained ice windows
and celestial ceilings,
the pious silence broken only by the gamboling of my dog.
Today it is 6o --
cold enough so that my
exhaled breath freezes in crusty patches on my muffler,
cold enough so that I’m
in danger of frostbite
were I not swaddled in
21st century technology,
and only a three mile
walk from home.
My thoughts turn to Scott’s
polar expedition,
planned with the precision
of brain surgery,
every little angel assigned
its spot on the head of the pin.
Except Amundsen beat
him by five days.
Five days!
Amundsen, who flew by
the seat of his pants
ate the sled dogs on
the way back,
and survived.
Devastated by the sight
of the Norwegian flag
gleefully proclaiming
Amundsen’s victory --
how I empathize, I who’ve
also been licked by unforeseen circumstances --
Scott and his four men
trudged stoically back to their camp,
harnessed to three sledges
loaded with geological specimens from the South Pole
and gear that would not
include enough fuel and food
when the weather turned
unexpectedly, exceptionally, bad
flouting the precise
meteorological forecasts Scott had procured
like Nancy Reagan and
her astrological charts (we all have our ways of coping)
which predicted ideal
conditions.
It got so cold
the sledges stuck in
the snow and pulled the men backward
like mermaids’
hands in drowned men’s hair.
At night in their tent,
some couldn’t separate
their socks from their skin
and the ones that could
next morning had to put
socks back on that were
umitigatingly unmelted.
In the arctic spring,
Scott’s tent was discovered,
pristine as a living
history museum,
a shrine to the best
laid plans of mice and men.
Scott lay in his sleeping
bag, his diary near at hand,
a map of his suffering,
for any who cared to
trace his journey:
“Every day we have been ready to start for our depot
11 miles away,
but outside the door
of the tent
it remains a scene of
whirling drift...
We shall stick it out
to the end,
but we are getting weaker,
of course,
and the end cannot be
far.
It seems a pity,
but I do not think I
can write more.”
Here’s how they
died, one by one,
like the victims in Agatha
Christie’s Ten Little Indians,
picked off by the cold-blooded
cold.
When his feet froze as
if they were encased in cement, Evans could no longer walk.
He was left where he
fell,
abandoned in a snowdrift
like a body coming to rest on a sea bed,
anchored by his failure.
Oates, a leaking sack
of sugar, disappeared during the night,
crawling out into the “whirling drift” of despair
so as not to burden the
others with the moral dilemma of
his dwindling strength.
Scott and the remaining
two men, Wilson and Bowers,
froze to death in their
tent,
an empty snow globe,
as they wait out a blizzard
of nine days’ duration
Thoughts of this --
at least I don’t
have to eat my dog,
at least I don’t
have to wear frozen socks,
at least I’m close
to home
at least this poem is
not my epitaph --
keep me warm
as I walk.
Current Events
I huddle here Hobbit-like
(except for the hairy feet)
surrounded by scented
light below a beamed ceiling
ostensibly shielded from
the ravaging cosmos
while a celebrity visits
abandoned HIV+ Vietnamese children
while retailers see mixed results in September
while a 13 foot python
explodes in an attempt to devour an Everglades alligator
while the decayed body
of a Virgina teenaged girl is found off the beaten path
while religious societies are found to have higher instances of STDs
while crews scramble to put
out California wildfires
while North
Dakota recovers from 24 inches of snow after temps in the 90s
while it’s currently
63 degrees and cloudy
while conservatives break
ranks with the White House over Harriet Miers
while fire guts the “Batman”
mansion
while Krispy Kreme defends
itself against a lawsuit over deceptive business practices
while Miami
is awarded the 2010 Superbowl
while Geminis face an
intense situation at work
and I wonder if I’ll
ever leave the house.
