To Virginia Woolf, late March—
I am apprehensive tonight as if the fog from the drive
to the farm followed me home. I am tired. My head aches
as well as my spine. Unlike you, I am not forced to rest
by your awful Dr. Savage—or pumped with Veronal, bromides,
milk, meat, and bread but I am anxious and like you, the guilt
creeps in like the geraniums overtaking the garden. It’s still cold
and the rain makes it feel as if winter and this administration
will never end. The rooms are closing in and soon we will be forced
to leave the City for good. It’s too early to tell if that will help writing
or stifle it. Or what color we will paint the walls. The dog will rest
on the wooden deck. There will be time to read. I will plant tulips
again. The tight bulbs will rest in the damp soil all next winter,
almost long enough for a baby to be born. I will try to remember
which beds hold the colors of each bloom—purple, orange, pink.
TO SYLVIA PLATH FROM PRIMROSE HILL—
I know all about living with a man
determined to drive
you to suicide. For twenty years,
I lived with a man whose passion
was to make me
mad. In every season, he plotted
new ways to wound me. Make me
think I was losing
my grip on sanity while traveling
with me to beautiful places—
Ireland, Italy, Greece.
A surgery resident, he forbade me
to visit the ER even when he knew
my appendix
was about to burst. When I almost died
of sepsis, he would not walk me back
to the hospital.
Fevered, in the ICU, I was leaving
my life and looked out the window
for the angel
wings that I saw in Venice.
I know how you felt, exhausted,
abandoned—
drunk on depression, desperate enough
to do what you could never undo.
I linger on the steps
of the London townhouse where you died.
I have saved no one. I stare at the blue
plaque—color
of Mary’s robes, of your New England sea.
TO SYLVIA PLATH, AFTER THE DUST SETTLED
After I had cancer but before my diagnosis,
after I left him
but before he initiated the eviction to remove me
and his daughter from our rent-stabilized apartment,
I listened
to the same playlist every day. Live through this
and you won’t look back I didn’t know then that
the unknown that swallowed me
like the darkness of Font de Gaume would be my
greatest gift—its freedom more complete than that
of animals running—
painted on prehistoric walls in ochre, oxide, charcoal.
I ran out of that apartment, that neighborhood,
out from two decades
of captivity. You would have thrived had you
been able to make it through that London winter.
Had you held on
long enough to not kneel in your kitchen or bow
your bent head into the open door of the oven,
you would have
walked out to the green fields of Primrose Hill,
the children tucked in their warm coats
to walk towards spring.
Had you not been so exhausted and alone,
you could have held their small hands to watch
the tulips emerge
from the ground in green spring—white, pink,
yellow. You could have showed them the huge
Rembrandt bulbs,
cream petals, edged with your favorite shade of red.
