Today is cold, misty. I’m thinking of the red fox I’ve seen in dreams since I was a teenager. She is my totem and my god. I’m hoping to see her again soon. I am waiting to follow her.
This morning, I’m eating raspberry buttermilk cake that Pat baked last night. The fruit, pressed by heat, left red body outlines full of seeds.
I sat down next to a man on the train who reeked of stale cigarettes. He seemed drunk, he kept sighing, squeezing a rollaway bag between his knees. He started talking, asking me how I was and that he liked my bag. I should have moved immediately. I pulled out my book instead. Within seconds he asked what I was reading. I flipped the cover: “Chapters in a Mythology: The poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Sylvia Plath, I said. He looked away, terrified and didn’t say another word the entire trip downtown. Thank you, Sylvia.
Today is the anniversary of her death. It makes me wonder if some people just burn fast and hard. Her poetry was much more complex than people give her credit for. It wasn’t just death. It was about discovering the true self and about rebirth.
Read a poem today. Try and scratch your surface. See where it goes.
The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
-Sylvia Plath
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