5.29.15

It's funny how things are simpatico sometimes. I pulled this poem, Farrow, from my poem-a-day email and thought, how rich and lush and inward it is, so much like Dark House by Sylvia Plath. I thought I'd do a comparison, but before I went to pull it up, I noticed the next poem email was Self Portrait with Sylvia Plath's Braid by Diane Seuss, and it was too perfect not to use. So, I give you these, cheers to kismet.



Farrow


Kimberly Johnson



Full in the fat wallow of me,
Superfluity
Even to the marrow—

Blood plumping along in a red swell
Of venules
Blushing my most unabashed

Skinpatches: nosetip, earlobe, wristshallow. O
This mother
Is a crush of too-muchness,

A malady of my baffled self awash.
Accomplished
Finally the days, will I find

My bones I lost, will my sharps and edges
Hedge this fleshy
Habit I’ve made of excess?

Already my heartracing startles
In another’s
Twitches, my dinner hiccups

Another’s diaphragm. Already and almost
I swear I feel
The protein creep of me, cell

By splitting cell, into another’s life.
This mother-grief
Sorrows not for the heart-close one

I’ll lose from me at my delivery
But for my own
Soul overboiling, unbound, bound

To a stranger’s groans, undone by his hurts
And remorses
To the third and fourth

Generations. What I’m birthing is my own
Diffusion.
Never again mere. Never again my own.






Self Portrait with Sylvia Plath's Braid


Diane Seuss




Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it
in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe.

I didn’t drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid
roped over my hands, heavier than lead.

My own hair was long for years.
Then I became obsessed with chopping it off,

and I did, clear up to my ears. If hair is beauty
then I am no longer beautiful.

Sylvia was beautiful, wasn’t she?
And like all of us, didn’t she wield her beauty

like a weapon? And then she married,
and laid it down, and when she was betrayed

and took it up again it was a word-weapon,
a poem-sword. In the dream I fasten

her braid to my own hair, at my nape.
I walk outside with it, through the world

of men, swinging it behind me like a tail.

I guess that leaves me thinking about the things that are part of us but not, like hair or a child growing, and how those things shape our identity. Not far off would be clothing, body art like tattoos, scars, and such. If we could borrow the shape of someone or something else, would it change us? Do you like to write from such a perspective?