Patient (Response Poem)

January 31, 2014

Tulips, by Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.  

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.  

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.  

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses  

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff  

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,  

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.  

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,  

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;  

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat  

stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.  

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley  

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books  

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.  

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them  

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.  

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe  

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.  

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,  

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,  

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.  

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,  

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow  

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,  

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.  

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.  

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river  

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.  

They concentrate my attention, that was happy  

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;  

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,  

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

Patient

We enter her room and are dazed by the void of dull whiteness.

Even the shaded windows let through only sickly shafts of light,

Bleached to the color of bone. It is winter, without snow’s shimmering

Crystalline beauty, without any cardinal speck save our red tulip bodies

As a pair of hands places us routinely on the white table near her.

She is there in the white bed, a small fly caught in thick cream, but Oh!

We love her. That’s what we were born for. We love her, we love her.

Her dark hair sulks about her head like a black halo,

Framing the face half-sunken into the pillow,

Translucent skin around a pale mouth, thin as death.

She lies perfectly still, as if in silent prayer, quiet meditation

On what it means to be nothing, willing her body

Just to fade into the sheets, to sink into the white oblivion.

But her eyes watch us, quick and resentful, where we stand.

We disturb her. We are restless thoughts in her hibernation,

Unwanted ripples in her languid pool. But something deeper

Has already hooked its greedy teeth in her. Something

Has leeched away at her muscles and mind, scuttled

Into bed with her, emptied her out and filled her

With its poison instead, starting in the brain but soon raging

Through every part of her, pumped by her blessed, still-beating heart.

Her hands do not remember the delicate movements

They once knew: weaving daisy chains in summer,

Sorting through loose change, slowly unwrapping

Bright plastic from a long-awaited sweet. Her arms

Forget how they once carried the day’s groceries,

Held a sleeping child, took on the invigorating struggle

Of swimming against a river’s current.

But we remember all of these things, and more. We whisper

Stories to her of the grasses in the field near her home,

Of bright-sounding school bells and children jumping rope.

We send her dreams with rich blooming gardens, the scent

Of jasmine, the color of a nightingale’s soft cries to the moon.

She begins to breathe these in like air, both joy and longing

Reawakening her memories of the world and her self.

We do what tulips do: we make the sun

Rise for her, make the earth turn for her.

We ring great church bells that rejoice in the day.

Have hope – we sing it – have hope! Remember

Daylight, remember snow! We cry out to the body,

Wishing only that the heart was not buried

So deep beneath skin and bone and blood.

Garland Girl

June 7, 2012

published in on the cusp's magazine "cycle" Summer 2012

Garland Girl

My sister, she sits on her summer swing, dressed in red,

the wind making her skirts billow, and all the cotton

seeds drift and scatter.  it seems like something more

should be happening, as she clutches a handful

of faded white daisies, flowers from her youth.

she stares off at the coming autumn, as I stare at this photograph

of her.  Years ago, she used to photograph

everything, especially the valerians in their dying reds,

the ancient daisies as they lost what youth

they had.  She’d sit by the foot of the poplars in a cotton

dress, watching summer disappear just like the handful

of dusty petals she held.  She would say, no more

are the days of sun and daisies.  And no more

were her days of sundresses and songs.  The photographs

she’d taken she burned until all that remained was a handful

of ashes and aged coals, the embers left burning red

only in her eyes as she watched the snow come down like cotton

quilts over the earth, like down plucked from goslings in their youth.

She longed for something golden or green, for the youth

of saplings as they stretch up to the sun, needing more and more

every day.  She wanted once again to dance through the cotton

fields as they spread their seeds.  Like a postcard photograph

the poppies would all bloom, gold and violet and red,

and their pollen would cling to her hair and her dress, a handful

of summer fairy dust.  In the long winter nights she had her hands full

of old daisy chains and pressed petals, stripped of youth

by january’s chill.  One by one, she pasted them all onto little red

valentines, her fingers shaking and tired, until she had more

hearts and dead flowers than she could count.  No photograph

could keep them alive, as no enchantment of the sun could keep the cotton

from blowing away in the wind.  While the world was draped in a cold cotton-

white she sat resigned, but in march was she ever a handful!

when the first green appeared in the snow, slowly showing through like a photograph

developing, her body remembered all the wildness and youth

it had lost when the leaves fell and the flowers wilted.  She needed more

of the life she saw growing, digging through snow and earth until her hands bled red.

Growing with the cotton, changing with the seasons of youth,

living and dying as inevitably as a handful of daisies; it’s hard to tell anymore,

but in this photograph, as we sit on her summer swing, our lips are stained red, red, red. 

better than bitter

December 7, 2011

better than bitter

hissing, spitting, the wind takes my hair in fingers

that are like yours except much, much more

harsh.  damn.  I took a walk to clear my head, but

all I can think about is you, you, you, and how I’m going to have to write

some really bad poetry.  these trite phrases keep beating

in my head like the ticking of clocks, a metronome to my own

insomnia – I hammer the same old words into place,

trying to find the right angles, like leaves against the wind

in a storm, but somehow everything comes out in a snowy

slush.  I miss your run-on sentences, your definitions

of words that don’t exist.  I want to say something

that’s as lovely as you are, something as real as rays of moonlight

spilling out onto wet asphalt.  I want to write

things that are barebacked and blackened

like church steeples and treble clefs.  but now,

I am famine-struck, and

    red as hunger.