Words

“Off from

the center”

—Sylvia Plath

Words

How truly queer—

Hacking away at the

Quotidian like I used to

As if words were—

The swords of Excalibur

Or an ax in the woods

Expecting words to—

Ring and echo in my

Expectant ears

For years writing—

Like a greedy whore

Doing it for money

Encountering them—

On the road instead

Speaking to me

Words are dry—

And riderless in

The back of the bus

On the ferry—

Crossing the Sound

A gift outta the blue

Indefatigably alien—

Re-establishing their

Own mirror reality

Doubling back at me—

From a blacktop pool

Of fixed stars  

The Other

Daniel Barkley

The Other

“mirrors are

filling with smiles”

—Sylvia Plath

Kindness

The other glides—

Around the house

Otherness can be

So refreshing

Otherwise—

I’d be stuck with

Just myself to

Blow smoke rings

In other words—

Words are windows

Mirrors for others

To see themselves

It’s not really a—

Cure for anything

Other than getting

Bored with oneself

Otherness is—

A necessary thing

Like smoking jewels

And coincidences

Here they come—

Arrows of mercy

The blood jet is poetry

Boss Cupid the Archer

Zoo of the New

“the zoo of the new”

—Sylvia Plath, “Child”

I tire of Big Daddy—

And all the little troublous

Daddies out there

Wringing my hands—

In this dark bedroom

Here in North Tawton

I tire of stalking—

St. Peter’s Cemetery

So grand and classical

Meditating on names—

And images wrinkling on

The rotting tombstones

The zoo of the new—

Is much more interesting

An absolutely new thing

I want to be the—

Clear eye of a child again

Fill it with color and ducks

Give me a new ceiling—

With shooting stars and

Snowdrops once again

A Book Called Ariel

A Book Called Ariel

“Fumy, spirituous mists

inhabit this place/Separated

from my house by a row of

headstones./I simply cannot

see where there is to get to”

—Sylvia Plath, “The Moon

and the Yew Tree”

There’s this light in my mind—

But it’s cold and planetary 
The trees in my mind are black

I’m black and blue with jealousy—

Ted has left me for Assia Weevil

My ankles bend like graveyard grasses

There in the St. Peter’s Cemetery—

Separated from me by a row of old

Tombstones leaning in the mist

I can’t see where I’m going—

Suddenly Court Green is dark and

Spirituous from some ancient time

Parts of this house date from the—

Eleventh century and there was once a

Prehistoric moated hill fort in the grounds

The view from my study is bleak—

A moody and mystical landscape that’s more

Like a person than just some acres of land

It responds to the slightest touch—

The slightest thought goes through it and

Comes back through me when I write

The old churchyard’s lopsided gravestones—

Covered in lichen set back from Court Green’s

Boundary wall there on Essington Road

The back wall of the property is lined—

With gravestones which remind me of an

Ancient wall of old corpses thru my window

 

Court Green is walled in by a nine-foot stonewall—

And beyond the house one can see the lushly

Green hills of the Devonshire countryside

Court Green has a tremendous power and—

Magnetism and gives me a certain fecundity for

The kind of poetry I’m writing now

 

My imagination is what attracted me to—

Ted Hughes in the first place there in Cambridge

When I was a naïve Fulbright Smith scholar

But our marriage couldn’t last—

He was like a panther caged up in the London

Regent’s Park Zoo pacing behind steel bars

He worshipped the white goddess—

And needed a new woman constantly to stay

In touch with his moody Mytholmroyd muse

I knew this when I fell in love with him—

I felt trapped like The Bell Jar in my New England

Womanhood fried dead like the Rosenbergs

He needed discipline in his life and an agent—

I typed up his manuscripts, helped him to get

Published, guided him toward Faber and fame

But in my naïve American Mademoiselle way—

I was goaded by Olive Prouty & pushing my image

Much too much toward a Stella Dallas success story

But even as I moved into Court Green pregnant—

I sensed the taint of tragedy because even in such Beautiful surroundings Ted had begun to prowl

 

Court Green was a door into the past—

It had a face all it’s own and had seen everything 
White as a knuckle and cold as a grinning skull

Dragging the nearby graveyard at night—

Like some dark old crime going on for a long time

The O-gape silent screams of pale white skulls

I live here now in complete despair—

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle me awake

Soberly bonging out the names of the saints

 
Dozens of devoted tongues affirm and stammer—

Fearing the Resurrection but knowing it will

Never and has never come about for the dead 

The tall gaunt yew tree points this out—

It has the same Gothic shape as dead ruins

Unloosening the bats and owls at midnight

 My eyes lift after them and find the moon—
The moon is like Aurelia my over-protective

Mother who I could never ever please

My moon mother is not like the sweet Mary—

I’m not the divine child that the Wise Men from

The East came to bless and worship

I’m not sweet like Mary or Aurelia—

Not calm like Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher

I’m more like Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar

I was hoping marriage and domesticity—

Would calm me down and center me rather

Than me constantly living on the edge

But I’ve fallen a long way since then—

Clouds are no longer flowering blue & mystical

Over the face of the moon and stars 

Inside Court Green the saints are all blue—

Floating on their delicate feet over my cold puke

My hands and face stiff with dry martinis 

St. Peter’s Cathedral sees nothing of this—

And the message of the yew tree is blackness

Blackness and a book called Ariel

Post-Arielesque

“a post-Ariel poetry collection”

—Anna Journey, After Ariel:

An Argument for Sylvia Plath's

Phantom Third Poetry Collection,

Plath Profiles 83

What if Sylvia survived?

Whether suicide or murder—

Would she have kept writing?

Would Sylvia’s Post-Arielesque—

Be full of rants against Big Daddies?

Or would her oeuvre have mellowed—

Beyond the Bitch Queen she was?

________________

“Plath wrote during the final two months of her life—all of her 1963 poems—as tangible fodder for a post-Ariel poetry collection. After all, Plath excluded every single 1963 poem—without exception—from her own version of the Ariel manuscript. Viewing these twelve poems from 1963 as Plath's nascent third book of poetry—instead of diluting their impressive heterogeneity amid the flames of Ariel's consumptive rage and rollicking, self-mocking burlesques—both honors Plath's original artistic intentions as well as appreciates the full trajectory of her complexly evolving poetic style.” An Argument for Sylvia Plath's Phantom Third Poetry Collection, Plath Profiles 83

Gigolo

Gigolo

—for Sylvia Plath

Pimp noir, I trick rather well—

I’m your typical lounge lizard, my dear

Cruising nightly with nothing to hide

It’s best we meet in a cul-de-sac tho

Gigolos are maniacal caricatures—

Doomed by their own narcissistic

Obsessions, afflicted with unstable

Notions of self & delusory aspirations

My palace of fine red velvet—

My condo full of endless mirrors with
An attic full of aging portraits while

Below I’m completely self-contained

No photographs of my lovers—

No rings in my ears, no camp

Professional gigolos are tres serious 
When Mr. Green talks, we listen intently 

Rich sugar daddies gulp at my bulk—

Here I am in my swank tuxedo

Sipping martinis and acting bored

Slippery and carnivorous as a shark

I’m a rather chic seedy Narcissus—

A malevolent Pepé Le Pew who poses

Like a vain exceptionally proud peacock

Unlike the self-effacing Miss Prufrock

I distance myself from lovers—

And emotional attachments to anybody

I’m like a self-sustaining aloof magnolia

Draped with decadent Spanish Moss

I’m rather happy alone here in my—

Seductively baroque kitschy bordello

Adjusting to my latest sagging face lift

With blasphemous aging panache

Sexuality is a threatening presence—

I avoid bright sharp claws of older men

Avoiding their lips and touch if I possibly

Can avoid their ubiquitous tacky menace

Increasingly crass and hyperbolic—

About my violent power over men

Whose jellyfish-lips sting me

They plead for my aphrodisiac squid

And there is no end, no end to it—

Gigolos never grow old, they end up

Shrieking to themselves alone at night

Glittering away in some Fontainebleau 

Some large dumpy royal châteaux—

Gratified by all the years of pimping

Reclusive by some lavishly decorated

Pool done in the mannerist style

Ceaselessly admiring themselves—

In their palatial, disreputable bordellos

Full of superficiality & deadly narcissism

Tenderly leaning & gazing at themselves

BIG DADDY

—for Ted Hughes

You don’t’ do it, you don’t do it—

Not any more, not any more for me

You’re just a lousy Yorkshire prick

Just another Mytholmroyd mooch

Just another gigolo outta the moors

Big Daddy, I had to kill you—

You died before you could become

A big bag full of shit Poet Laureate

Ghastly glittering Easter Island slab

Xmas present for all the pub whores

Panther, Fox, Pike, Prick—

Right outta some freaky British zoo

Mythologizing your tres boorish manhood

Your haughty Heathcliff meandering meat

It got stuck up there a lot in inside me

I thought you were a train engine—

Your Big Bad Daddy ugly Panzer Prick

Huffing and puffing and pulling me

All the way to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen

Always stuffing my head in some oven

Just call me Madame Sosostris—

After my lovely gipsy auntie ancestress

Like hoity-toity Miss Eliot of Faber & Faber

Doing you at his swanky cocktail part

Such a brand new Bad Boy talented poet!

Naturally Miss Auden is jealous—

But she settles for sloppy seconds

Gobbling your gobbledygook goo

As if it were ambrosia of the godz

How faggots love a butchy fascist!

Especially a Big Bad Brute like you—

Breaking pretty little hearts in two

I used to always think that way too

Thinking you were so very tall & cool

But now I know you’re just a fool

You’d pull it out in the sack—

How I loved it, your rack and your screw

How I said I do, I do, Big Daddy, I do!

Gimme your nice big Mein Kampf Meatloaf

Strangle me like a rabid Rabbit Hunter

The black telephone rings off the hook—

I pull it outta you by the fucking root

You worm your way deep inside me

You turn me upside-down, inside-out

Then you go to the local pub and pout

But Daddy, Daddy, you’re dead now—

I shot you in the head with your shotgun

Fucking Assia there in the graveyard

Court Green spermy Splendor in the Grass

You shot your big wad and then I shot you

I buried your big fat black heart—

Down deep in the dark Devon cemetery

Dancing and stomping over your grave

Big Daddy, Big Daddy, I’m done with you

Big Daddy, Big Daddy, down there in the dirt