sifting the rubble, the relics.
Electro-shock. The other schizophrenics
Making lambs of paper plates. Your choice
Was to write.
I want to be a god.
It is not that I want to be dead. I want perfection.
Assia’s kiss something I saw, the kitchen
Dirty now. I backed away from Ted.
And there were more, and there had always been.
I wanted to will the world into my own.
I didn’t like it, terrified or cold.
It was ruined. You can’t go back, then.
Betrayal nibbled there, along my bone.
It was inside that kiss that I grew old.
3. Ted
It was inside that kiss that I grew bold.
Sometimes there is relief. No one to see
(Except, it seems, my wife). Sometimes, a beauty
Is inevitable. Maude Gonne. Yeats failed,
But his poetry would make his singing name.
I wanted everything. A language. Awe.
I wanted the insides of what I saw.
And so I left. There was a separate room
For Sylvia, and also for Assia.
Not too many people know a third.
So the world can be. I was dividing.
I didn’t see my conscience as an idea,
But rather as a way inside the word.
When Sylvia died, I was in hiding.
4. Olwyn, Ted’s Sister
When Sylvia died, I was, in hating
Her already, an unexpected state.
Bitch. Like Barbie on a primal date,
She choreographed what we’d all be wading
Through for life: her life, her observations.
Like Virginia Woolf, she made the money
That paid for everything. It was like honey,
Her papers and her poems. Shrewd. Way stations
To the dead. Meanwhile, I watched the children grow:
To school, tra-la-la. It is hard to be the story
Of a ghost, of people’s own vague narratives.
It seemed it wrote itself long time ago.
I loved Ted too. I am not really sorry.
You tell yourself the story as it lives.
5. Shura, Ted’s Daughter with Assia
You tell yourself the story as it lives,
And mine was that my mother was as dead
As I was. You see, we lived inside the head
Of Sylvia, and because she had her sheaves
Of manuscripts, then, doubled, so would we.
I was four when I died, and I was “one up,”
The child who died, a pretty buttercup,
Along with Mother. This, too, is family.
There are things that I would like to have done,
But sometimes you’re a prop, or almost placed
To give dramatic contrast to the act.
We were more than Sylvia, the one
Who was two, the one who was twice blessed.
We were an undeniable fact.
6. Nicholas
We were an undeniable fact,
And we were a fiction, in other words, a family.
I was a baby, both Ted Hughes and Plath:
And Otto too. From genealogy,
The traits could re-connect, for all we knew,
But something else as well. A mythic true.
I had a well inside that I’d look down,
Like sorrow’s fetus, opening. No sound
The day I killed myself. I was my mother
Without her fame, but I would know the loss
Of ambition hurling down, with vicious seething.
I was, in the end, a version of her father.
My hanging was ancestral. All our eyes.
In a row, we are our silent voices mouthing.
7. Aurelia
In a row we are our silent voices mouthing.
I want to be last. As the official word,
I want the world to know my girl was good.
I don’t want people thinking of her breathing
Out these lies. I want the smart and normal,
The one who would do anything for Mother.
I want to take the rights back from the father.
She was sad then. She cooked. She shaped a formal
Way that everything was going to be.
I didn’t like that she was cruel about
The things I did. But either way, I bless.
My goal is to control her legacy.
It doesn’t matter in her winding sheet:
You never know the truth, but try to guess.
Buying
