A Day with Sylvia
A cracked tooth, a brunette
and more poetry than a sane mind
can allow -
I spent a day with Sylvia Plath.
She always assembled words
as if her ink was drawn in mouthfuls,
gushing on sheets like popped pockets of blood,
metaphors forming the brilliant highways
with horrific and astounding imagery.
She did not even know I was there.
I was by her knee like a dog,
drinking and sitting when she sat,
ocean-eyed and swallowing with droning pupils.
Her gray face and feeble furniture
started to resemble each other
the more the children began to move and play.
The children played on the floor while she
melded onto the coach, inches from
where their voices screeched and cracked.
She put her children to bed after four scotch on the rocks.
She hummed
a song from "Fiddler on the Roof"
with a champagne voice
and laughed weightlessly as she
watched television, her Indian boned cheeks
floating toward her wet dazzled eyes...
and at that moment I knew she
had been felt happiness before; I
had caught her laugh like a lightning bug,
pink fuzzed and gleaming from her imperfect porcelain.
Glass in hand, sitting glazed
on the sofa, tears dissipated from glass -
ice eaten by buoyant mango liquor half full
In the sopping crystal.
I was drunk by the time we swam
in the lake and left when she
fell asleep. She slept like she had
no idea she would on day immortalize.
Like she had never written a sad
or brilliant verse before.
Poetry by Christin Brennan
Read 1079 times
Written on 2007-10-17 at 19:45
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