Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath by Sina Queyras
If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death, nor
Will you feel the tulip’s skin, nor the soft gravel
Of childhood under cheek. You will have writhed
Across the page for a hard couplet, a firm rhyme, ass
High as any downward dog, and cutlass arms
Lashing any mother who tries to pass: Let’s be frank
About the cost of spurs, mothers like peonies
Whirling in storm drains, families sunk before
Reaching open water. The empty boudoir
Will haunt, but not how you imagine it will.
Nothing, not even death frees mothers
From the cutting board, the balloons, their
Lack of resistance, thoughts, he said, quick
As tulips staggering across the quad.
She heard, I like my women splayed
Out, red. Read swollen, domesticated,
Wanting out. The tulips were never warm
My loves, they never smelled of spring,
They never marked the path out of loneliness,
Never led me home, nor to me, nor away
From what spring, or red, or tulips
Could never be.
© 2014 Sina Queyras. Today’s poem originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Poetry.
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