Not By Me

ELECTRA ON AZALEA PATH

BY SYLVIA PLATH

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 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 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 silts 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 at 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.

THE ACT OF YOUTH

By John wieners

And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night

What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs

to dull the senses, what little I have left,

what more can be taken away?

The fear of travelling, of the future without hope

or buoy. I must get away from this place and see

that there is no fear without me: that it is within

unless it be some sudden act or calamity

to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without

memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If

I could just get out of the country. Some place

where one can eat the lotus in peace.

For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or

am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson

or experience to those young who would trod

the same path, without God

unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance

on the acts committed while young under un-

due influence or circumstance. Oh I have

always seen my life as drama, patterned

after those who met with disaster or doom.

Is my mind being taken away me.

I have been over the abyss before. What

is that ringing in my ears that tells me

all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind.

Woe to those homeless who are out on this night.

Woe to those crimes committed from which we

can walk away unharmed.

So I turn on the light

And smoke rings rise in the air.

Do not think of the future; there is none.

But the formula all great art is made of.

Pain and suffering. Give me the strength

to bear it, to enter those places where the

great animals are caged. And we can live

at peace by their side. A bride to the burden

that no god imposes but knows we have the means

to sustain its force unto the end of our days.

For that is what we are made for; for that

we are created. Until the dark hours are done.

And we rise again in the dawn.

Infinite particles of the divine sun, now

worshipped in the pitches of the night.