Eva
I have successfully, and pathetically, gone forty-eight hours without eating, surviving on nothing more than coffee and cigarettes….I fear I shall turn into Sylvia Plath, save the head-in-oven incident. I couldn’t even if I tried…no oven.
Sonnet : To Eva
All right, let's say you could take a skull and break it
The way you'd crack a clock; you'd crush the bone
Between steel palms of inclination, take it,
Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.
This was a woman : her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.
Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.
The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.
Sonnet : To Eva
All right, let's say you could take a skull and break it
The way you'd crack a clock; you'd crush the bone
Between steel palms of inclination, take it,
Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.
This was a woman : her loves and stratagems
Betrayed in mute geometry of broken
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.
Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.
The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans
To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.
posted by Chishiki Lauren at 8:02 PM
2 Comments:
That's a great poem. It's difficult, I think, for guys to admit to liking Plath. There seems to be an unfair association of liking Plath with being a neurotic teenage girl. Not a big fan of "Daddy", just because I've had to read it so damn often in various lit classes, but "Lady Lazarus" is quite good. I should read more of her work. I'm working slowly through the collected earlier poems of William Carlos Williams at the moment, but maybe after that ... You know, I'm never getting this thesis done ...
I have her collected works...you can borrow it when I'm finished, with one stipulation: finish the thesis. Then we'll talk :)
I hope I don't fall into the category of neurotic teenage girls, though at times I'm sure it's quite plausible. My fascination with Plath stems from her ability to make going completely insane sound so logical. Or maybe it's simply that I can relate, that at times it's all too much to handle alone, and allowing oneself to slip into utter despair is always tempting.
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