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Sylvia and Trisha and Me Something this morning, and I've no clue what, reminded me of a poem by Sylvia Plath which I used to love, though unlike many such writings, I never bothered to commit it to memory. It is called "Last Words," and I shall not reprint it here, but you can find a copy of it at the PlathOnline website, along with a many of her other poems. The online version, though, is fraught with typographical errors and misprints, however, so I suggest you find a copy of The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. My Mother gave me a copy of that volume for one of my birthdays as a teenager, after learning how very taken with Plath's work I'd become and what an inspiration her writing was to me. Now, as an adult, I come to her writing with a greater understanding, both of the human experiences about which she wrote, and of many of the allusions she makes in her writing. Plath was not, actually, an overtly morbid writer, as many would make her out to be. It is fascinating to read Plath's work in chronological order, observing the development of her craft as she moves from her early somewhat self-conscious style of writing, which seems to have the shadow of various influences looming above it, to the final acutely observant style of the Ariel poems. She wrote incisively, her muse's eye cutting through the fog, slicing through the flesh like a scalpel and utterly unafraid to expose and examine the deeply personal viscera which lay beneath. Kate Moses, an awfully clever woman who used to write a column called "Mothers Who Think" for salon.com, and who bears, I think, some resemblance to Plath, has this past February (coinciding with the fortieth anniversary of Plath's self-asphyxiation) published a novel called Wintering, a fictionalised account of the poet's last months, extrapolated from what appears to be an enormous amount of research. I'm looking forward to reading it, as from what I've read, she really does seem to immerse herself in all the knowable details of Plath's final months, and perhaps thereby paints at least a plausible, if not necessarily totally accurate, portrait. In an essay on her site, Moses quotes Robert Graves' book The White Goddess, apparently quite an influence on Plath's work, in which he writes, "A woman who concerns herself with poetry should, I believe, either be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence . . . or the Muse in the complete sense . . . impartial, loving, severe, wise." Moses and I agree that this is the state which Plath achieved in her last writings. "Last Words" takes me back to a strange time, a memory of being probably sixteen, sitting in my dark grey paneled music room, with its red brick fireplace and its faux-stone formica floor with my best friend from high school. I was secretly in love with him, though I can hardly call it a well-kept secret; we spent absurd amounts of time together, and our level of familiarity with each other was more like the implicit erotic undercurrent of connection between twins than that of mere friends. It may have been the first time he came home with me and spent the night; I'm not sure. The enormous window in the music room faced east, and it was evening, so what little light remained reflected in the eastern sky was exsanguinated to the grey of the walls and the floor as it filtered weakly through the antique white drapes. I wrote incessantly in those days, and he'd read much of what I'd written, and was generally pretty impressed, or at least pretended to be; much of what I wrote was dedicated to him, in one way or another, yet a few years later when I confessed to him both that I was bisexual and that I'd harboured a crush on him for years, he claimed not to have known, and smiled that it changed nothing (which was true -- I lived five hundred miles away and was leaving for Europe, and he was practically engaged to the woman he'd been dating for years). So we sat in the fading afternoon, talking of poetry, and I, fascinated with the concept of my own demise as I was, read to him the lines of "Last Words." I still remember the way the last words of the poem seemed to fall from my mouth to the floor in that surprisingly echo-prone room, like the whispering crackle of dead leaves on the sidewalk outside, and the thickness and weight of the silence that followed. Who could know how to respond to someone so young intoning words from a woman who'd been medicated to her own demise some thirty years before, her thoughts on that ending, viewing herself as some sort of modern English Pharoah-ess? So I spent a little time this morning re-reading Sylvia (I feel we are friends of a sort; though she died more than a decade before I was born, her writing, so heavily-stocked with chilly visuals, doubtless influences my own, and after all, she, too, was a Scorpio.), listening to Tori ("These tears I've cried, I've cried a thousand oceans" -- I only began to like that song after seeing the video for it; somehow something suddenly made sense, and I sat and wept.), and reading the story of the Central Park Jogger's coming forward, fourteen years after the fact, to reveal her identity and to tell the story of her recovery, reclaiming her life. In 1989, when she was brutally attacked, beaten, raped, sodomised, elaborately bound, dragged into the woods and left for dead, I'd not even seen New York; the concept of what had happened was distant and surreal to me, living a very sheltered existence in rural Southeastern Virginia under the watchful eye of parents who were both Officers of the Court. I knew that such things happened, of course, as I'd been warned sternly against any sort of behaviour that might put me at risk to have anything unpleasant befall me, not to mention prohibited from wandering too far alone on my leash, but such a violent occurrence so nationally publicised naturally made a serious impression. Probably not until a few years later, when a building on the family farm was burglarised and vandalised by a drug-addled murderer on a rather severe bender (no one was in the building or at the farm at the time; the perpetrator was later caught in Florida, I believe), did the reality of violent criminal acts really sink into my consciousness. Now, of course, it seems a commonplace occurrence, which has even struck me personally, in the vandalising, and later, burglary, of my car. Who can say how many sirens scream up to my windows on a daily basis? r
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