SYLVIA

Tags

poem, poetry, power

SYLVIA

there is no
literary irony
that life
cannot outdo

what did you think?
what did you believe?
(the questions that
haunt like
icy winds
in your head)

did you imagine
your poems would speak for you
come to your recuse
drown out
those dark voices?

My dear, you know,
as do I, that
they come from
the same place

no readers are here now
to offer praise or
share suffering

there is only
the despair, a world gone cold
as a winter crematorium
closed temporarily
for peace

Oh the lightning
of those people, their
sure male-lion faith
in conquest, in sexual prowess

but now you burrow to where
the gas hisses, asphyxiating,

none of the power of
those vital animals, powerful
brutal, beautiful

we all know
the poem

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TO SEE WHAT SYLVIA HAD BEEN COOKING

I stuck my
head in the oven

to see what Sylvia
had been cooking

one whiff of that gas and
my body was ash was
naked in the snow

deciding whether to
shuffle silently
or die
on the wire

but then
darkness eclipsed everything

the kind of
everything will be forgotten
darkness where

consciousness
if it shrink not
down to the size of
a piece of atom

(part of the
great tart in
the
design of
some unquestionable pie)

can park itself for the rest of the experiment
for the curvature of space
to go fully Möbius

and this just
the crust

waiting (so slow
to rise) on

infinitely better time.