Sylvia Plath last night

photo: candy diez


My life’s accumulating emergencies. And I just found out that my greatest loss yet is that I cannot find my Sylvia Plath Collected Poems. I've got to have that back; Corinna, now gone in my life, gave that to me. Kim, did I lend it to you? I know I did, way back when you and... okay,enough with conjuncts and adjuncts, you said you can't stand her, the bastard's a girl. Hand it over here, please? Along with your head.

This is the kind of loss that makes me feel unrooted.

Last night someone said Plath is a lesbian.

Sawi, listen to this. Sylvia Plath is a lesbian. You haven’t thought of that, had you? I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair. I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair. O mermaids singing!

So Sawi, your unforgettable line, which you must have forgotten by now, should be, Ah. You’re like Sylvia Plath.

But how come LitCrit never deigned take up Lesbos? They can't handle the girl? Even Paglia stayed on shore. Sucked the incest Daddy-Daddy crap. Ach, Ach. Every woman adores a fascist. She will wrestle to death with her daemon father. How faggoty. Why wrestle with someone you overthrew when you were two?

Every book a lesbian book – you know the feeling? As you read for instance The Hanging Man?

A vulturous boredom pinned me to this tree
If he were I he would do what I did

Goddamn. If one becomes a lesbian by education, that's where I gotit, not from Bob Dylan, and not from Adrienne Rich or Margaret Randall those institutionals.

That contempt for her sex? That what-am-I-doing here nausea?

The smog of cooking the smog of hell!
I live with women who think like birds.

You say I should drown my girl.
She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two.

Ted Hughes who?
Ah yes. My friend Victor said he is not a lesbian. He is a genius.

His neighbor, the impotent husband, slumps out for a coffee.
We try to keep him in. An old pole for the lightning.

Moon-skulled.
Gilled like a fish.

All ripples.
A well-done sum.

But it hit me first when I read The Bell Jar. Rejected it because oh my, I was always claiming, claiming, all spurious. Like my claim that Frances Farmer's last friend was a lesbian, Jean Radcliff sumthin, how tiresome they say so what?

That dyke Joan there? The hardly- noticed character, who at the book’s end was found hanging in a tree at the park in the dead of winter? Of course that was she, Sylvia.

Not?

Her unknown lover, then. Her doppelganger.

Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss!