O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and
spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a
tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the
roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you
go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing
potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just
how did you lie down into?
Thief --
how did you crawl
into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for
so long,
the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on
our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we
downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of
analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with
plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet
deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death
again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
O Sylvia, I
remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old
story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New
York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a
crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our
cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year,
old suicides
and I know at the news of your death
a terrible
taste for it, like salt,
(And me,
me too.
And now,
Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride
home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms
stretched out into that stone place,
what is your death
but an
old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your
poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's
gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to
sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O
blonde thing!
February 17, 1963