Last Days of Plath

For years through my teen and twenties, I used to keep Plath's "Collected Poems" by my bed. For the clarity of angst, anger, the purity of language amid such fierce emotions. In years since then, her words are sometimes the first coming to me upon waking nauseous from a hangover caused by both beer and emotional betrayal: "What have I eaten? Lies and smiles."

Plath's words were mine in my teens, before any real heartbreak or morning-after nausea. But when heartbreak, true heart sickness, came... she made things both better and worse. She lent a purity and starkness and historical backdrop to the suffering, a godsend. But then she also indicated that such pain could NOT be tolerated...

At 53, I'd like to tell the 30-year-old Plath: Sure it can. Give it a few years or decades. Assia Wevill is a thrice-married Skank. Ted Hughes is a lower-class whore himself who got lucky with you. Would it be so painful to go back to the States and have a pleasant life? I'm sure, at 30, it initially seemed tragic that your raw literarily-infused sexual fantasy didn't come true, but...given a decade or so, you would have recognized and more fully appreciated the value of the calm and lucidity that you so purely (and ironically and heroically, given the circumstances) displayed in your poems, even right up until the end. You saw the deeply flawed Ted and couldn't live with "it," or without it, at the moment. I think, though, given a decade or so, you could have come to peace with the "letting go" of his chaos. And sought peace.

I feel terrible for her. I've had a few people that I was in love with in my life, but nothing that approached a true physical/spiritual/mental union. Even these random people hurt me deeply. I can only barely imagine what Plath felt.


Mystic (February 1, 1963)

The air is a mill of hooks ---
Questions without answer,
Glittering and drunk as flies
Whose kiss stings unbearably
In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

I remember
The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,
The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun's conflagrations, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?

The pill of the Communion tablet,
The walking beside water? Memory?
Or picking up the bright pieces
Of Christ in the faces of rodents,
The tame flower-nibblers, the ones

Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable ---
The humpback in his small, washed cottage
Under the spokes of the clematis.
Is there no great love, only tenderness?
Does the sea

Remember the walker upon it?
Meaning leaks from the molecules.
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.

The heart has not stopped.