In ‘63 with gas turned on,
Head in the oven and gone,
Her final poem bristles like a crime scene.
I scour for clues but find none,
No more than for any other cosmic lie.
I read her backwards:  Ariel to Colossus,
Steaming upriver to the heart of darkness,
But no one waits for me on the jetty.
At the waul of a baby, I’m shaken awake.
My instinct is sound: read backwards.
All words begin in death.
All life, too.

_____________

Ostensibly, this poem is a response to the news that marine biologist, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, committed suicide on March 16th, 2009.  But that’s just an excuse for me to ask, yet again: what is it we do when we write poetry?  what is it we do when we write anything?  That’s the same question that the Easter story asks.  It’s a question that sets the Word and Death in conversation.

Of all the useless appendages,
your earlobe is the loveliest.
I’ve never nibbled on your tonsils
and know nothing of appendices.
I whisper and it stirs
the white down that grows there.
Like the soft sand of Normandy,
it’s the beachhead of my advance.
I order my words, and off
they go, over the top,
to take the cochlea,
the stirrup and anvil!  With precision
and discipline, too, they charge.
But when you lob a glance at me and my nibbling lips,
everything scatters:  my words, my thoughts; they wade, they drown, or get mowed down in the blood-drenched sand, and flap a useless arm in the wet muck, and wait for the tide to roll in and scour it all clean.
Later, alone and analytical,
I’ll ask what went wrong
and hear again the answer of the ages:
you were unprepared.

we the implicated
we the intricated
we the strand and
bolt of fabric
woven tight like
mother’s love and
screaming child

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The ceiling fan above doesn’t turn.
It waits on a switch that never trips.
The snow outside sits cold and white.
It waits on a sun that never shines.
The world is a head with empty sockets
spinning itself into nothing and nothing
stirs me as I lie on my bed and see how
the ceiling fan above doesn’t turn.
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Do you wonder what I do
now I’m gone away from you?
Do you imagine how I live
with the freedom that you give?
Do you stand alone and gaze
at the brightly whorled haze
from my spackled palette knife
that paints a lustrous life?
Or do you look with clearer eye
past the colour-dappled lie
to the worn concrete greys
of my empty days?
Or do you call me back to you
in a soft and pastel hue
arguing the virtue of
what passed for love?
Though I wish to lie with you
it is the lie I must undo.
Only when I am untrue
will I show good faith to you.