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“One of our our basic human biases is the tendency to take credit for our successes as a function of our personal excellence and to attribute out failures to external circumstances. Privilege is problematic precisely because it leads the privileged to believe that their advantages in life are entirely earned and the disadvantages of the less fortunate entirely merited, when in reality powerful cultural currents can carry us in either direction based on cultural, political, and economic forces wholly external to our character, ability, and personal worth. But when all of our external conditions are stripped away, be they fortuitous or wretched, who are we in our innermost personhood? What erects the geometry of the “I”? –Sylvia Plath on Privilege from the Journals

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Contusion 

Color floods to the spot, dull purple. The rest of the body is all washed-out, The color of pearl.

In a pit of a rock The sea sucks obsessively, One hollow the whole sea's pivot.

The size of a fly, The doom mark Crawls down the wall.

The heart shuts, The sea slides back, The mirrors are sheeted.

-Sylvia Plath, 1962

images: Gerhard Richter, Rain 1 (1988) and Rain 2 (1988)

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Amnesiac 

No use, no use, now, begging Recognize! There is nothing to do with such a beautiful blank but smooth it. Name, house, car keys,

The little toy wife– Erased, sigh, sigh. Four babies and a cocker!

Nurses, the size of worms, and a minute doctor Tuck him in. Old happenings

Peel from his skin. Down the drain with all of it! Hugging his pillow

Like the red-headed sister he never dared to touch, He dreams of a new one– Barren, the lot are barren!

And of another color. How they’ll travel, travel, travel, scenery Sparking off their brother-sister rears

A comet tail! And money the sperm fluid of it all. One nurse brings in

A green drink, one a blue. They rise on either side of him like stars. The two drinks flame and foam.

O, sister, mother, wife, Sweet Lethe is my life. I am never, never, never coming home!

                                  -Sylvia Plath, 21 October 1962

image: Louise Bourgeois, “Girl with Hair,” 2007-09. archival dyes on silk, hemmed to linen.

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Sylvia Plath with her son, Nicholas

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Ouija

It is a chilly god, a god of shades, Rises to the glass from his black fathoms. At the window, those unborn, those undone Assemble with the frail paleness of moths, An envious phosphorescence in their wings. Vermillions, bronzes, colors of the sun In the coal fire will not wholly console them. Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim. The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger. The old god dribbles, in return, his words. The old god, too, write aureate poetry In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes, Fair chronicler of every foul declension. Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean. Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur Ravel above us, mistily descend, Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire. He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair Who has saltier aphrodisiacs Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death, Her wormy couriers aer at his bones. Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine. I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe What flinty pebbles and ploughable upturns As ponderable tokens of her love. He, godly, doddering, spells No succinct Gabriel from the letters here But floridly, his amorous nostalgias. -Sylvia Plath, 1957 image: film still from matthew barney's "river of fundament," 2014

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Epitaph For Fire And Flower (1956)

You might as well haul up This wave's green peak on wire To prevent fall, or anchor the fluent air In quartz, as crack your skull to keep These two most perishable lovers from the touch That will kindle angels' envy, scorch and drop Their fond hearts charred as any match. Seek no stony camera-eye to fix The passing dazzle of each face In black and white, or put on ice Mouth's instant flare for future looks; Stars shoot their petals, and suns run to seed, However you may sweat to hold such darling wrecks Hived like honey in your head. Now in the crux of their vows hang your ear, Still as a shell: hear what an age of glass These lovers prophesy to lock embrace Secure in museum diamond for the stare Of astounded generations; they wrestle To conquer cinder's kingdom in the stroke of an hour And hoard faith safe in a fossil. But though they'd rivet sinews in rock And have every weathercock kiss hang fire As if to outflame a phoenix, the moment's spur Drives nimble blood too quick For a wish to tether: they ride nightlong In their heartbeats' blazing wake until red cock Plucks bare that comet's flowering. Dawn snuffs out star's spent wick, Even as love's dear fools cry evergreen, And a languor of wax congeals the vein No matter how fiercely lit; staunch contracts break And recoil in the altering light: the radiant limb Blows ash in each lover's eye; the ardent look Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.

-Sylvia Plath

Image: Eve Hesse, Untitled ("Spectres"), 1960

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  Monologue at 3 a.m.

Better that every fiber crack  and fury make head,  blood drenching vivid  couch, carpet, floor  and the snake-figured almanac  vouching you are  a million green counties from here,  than to sit mute, twitching so  under prickling stars,  with stare, with curse  blackening the time  goodbyes were said, trains let go,  and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from  my one kingdom.

--Sylvia Plath (1956)

  Images, top to bottom: Maya Deren, Ritual in Transfigured Time, 1946; Carolee Schneemann, Up to and Including Her Limits, 1973-76, Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer ("She saw him disappear by the river/They asked her to tell them what happened/Only to discount her memory"), 1987.

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Poppies In July

Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns

And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep!  If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

--Sylvia Plath, 20 July 1962

Images: top, Cy Twombly, "Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire That Consumes All Before It," 1978; bottom: Cy Twombly, "Lepanto" (panel 9 of 12), 2001.

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The Everlasting Monday (1957)

Thou shalt have an everlasting Monday and stand in the moon.

The moon's man stands in his shell, Bent under a bundle Of sticks. The light falls chalk and cold Upon our bedspread. His teeth are chattering among the leprous Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes.

He also against black frost Would pick sticks, would not rest Until his own lit room outshone Sunday's ghost of sun;  Now works his hell of Mondays in the moon's ball, Fireless, seven chill seas chained to his ankle.

-Sylvia Plath

Images: Patrick Dougherty "Stickwork" (via archdaily: http://bit.ly/I0bYkD); Matthew Barney "Anatomy of a Cremaster"; Paul M. Alsop, "Star Trail" (http://bit.ly/11hw0Om).

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Full Fathom Five (1958)

Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide’s coming When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of orgins Unimaginable. You float near As kneeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear Of, not fathomed. All obscurity Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I Cannot look much but your form suffers Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea. The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me To half-believe: your reappearance Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines Of your grained face shed time in runnels: Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels Of the ocean. Such sage humor and Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground- Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole. Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle To root deep among knuckles, shinbones, Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once Seen by any man who kept his head, You defy questions;

You defy godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom’s border Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember. Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.

-Sylvia Plath

Images: Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor's The Tempest (2010). From left to right: photo by unknown via http://alexrosses.tumblr.com/post/40441369190; photo by unknown via http://sanitynotavailable.tumblr.com; Jackson Pollock, "Full Fathom Five" (1947), MoMA collection.

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Electra on Azalea Path (1959)

The day you died I went into the dirt, Into the lightless hibernaculum Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard. It was good for twenty years, that wintering— As if you had never existed, as if I came God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly: Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity. I had nothing to do with guilt or anything When I wormed back under my mother's heart. Small as a doll in my dress of innocence I lay dreaming your epic, image by image. Nobody died or withered on that stage. Everything took place in a durable whiteness. The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill. I found your name, I found your bones and all Enlisted in a cramped necropolis, Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence. In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower Breaks the soil. This is Azalea Path. A field of burdock opens to the south. Six feet of yellow gravel cover you. The artificial red sage does not stir In the basket of plastic evergreens they put At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot, Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye: The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red. Another kind of redness bothers me: The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth My mother unrolled at your last homecoming. I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy. The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing; My mother dreamed you face down in the sea. The stony actors poise and pause for breath. I brought my love to bear, and then you died. It was the gangrene ate you to the bone My mother said; you died like any man. How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting in my throat. O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. It was my love that did us both to death.

Images: William Blake Richmond, "Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon," 1874 (top); Odilon Redon, "The Death of Ophelia," 1905 (bottom).

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Elm - 19 April 1962  (For Ruth Fainlight)

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;  It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.  Is it the sea you hear in me,  Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? Love is a shadow.  How you lie and cry after it. Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.  All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,  Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing.  Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?  This is rain now, the big hush. And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.  I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires. Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.  The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. I let her go. I let her go  Diminshed and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me.  I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.  I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me;  All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrevables?  Is it for such I agitate my heart?  I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face  So murderous in its strangle of branches?-- Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults  That kill, that kill, that kill. 

Image: Gary Braasch (CORBIS), "Reflections of an elm tree through a pond in Concord, Massachusetts." The American Elm is the official state tree of Massachusetts. http://bit.ly/XO2iCh

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Crossing the Water  -  4 April 1962

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.  Where do the black trees go that drink here? Their shadows must cover Canada. A little light is filtering from the water flowers. Their leaves do not wish us to hurry: They are round and flat and full of dark advice. Cold worlds shake from the oar.  The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes. A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand; Stars open among lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.

Image: Vija Celmins 

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An Appearance  -  4 April 1962

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me.  Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!  I hear her great heart purr.  From her lips ampersands and percent signs  Exit like kisses.  It is Monday in her mind: morals  Launder and present themselves.  What am I to make of these contradictions?  I wear white cuffs, I bow.  Is this love then, this red material  Issuing from the steele needle that flies so blindingly?  It will make little dresses and coats,  It will cover a dynasty.  How her body opens and shuts --  A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges!  O heart, such disorganization!  The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.  ABC, her eyelids say.

Image: Marc Chagall, Blue Lovers, 1914

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White  Godiva, I unpeel--  Dead hands, dead stringencies. 

And now I  Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.  The child's cry 

Melts in the wall  And I  Am the arrow, 

The dew that flies  Suicidal, at one with the drive  Into the red 

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

-excerpt from "Ariel" (27 October 1962)  http://bit.ly/95CzFU

image: carolee schneemann, eye body: 36 transformative actions, 1963  http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/works.html

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