Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath

If you can’t feel love in life you won’t feel it in death, nor Will you feel the tulip’s skin, nor the soft gravel Of childhood under cheek. You will have writhed Across the page for a hard couplet, a firm rhyme, ass High as any downward dog, and cutlass arms Lashing any mother who tries to pass: Let’s be frank About the cost of spurs, mothers like peonies Whirling in storm drains, families sunk before Reaching open water. The empty boudoir Will haunt, but not how you imagine it will. Nothing, not even death frees mothers From the cutting board, the balloons, their Lack of resistance, thoughts, he said, quick As tulips staggering across the quad. She heard, I like my women splayed Out, red. Read swollen, domesticated, Wanting out. The tulips were never warm My loves, they never smelled of spring, They never marked the path out of loneliness, Never led me home, nor to me, nor away From what spring, or red, or tulips Could never be.