I Know Why Sylvia Plath
Put Her Head In The Oven

That morning Ted packed his briefcase.

Drove with a poets’ gravity

Over the mountain

Of dishes. The sinking

Feeling. Leftovers. That morning

She woke up on the bathroom floor.

She woke up with snatches of poetry

And a raging head but the babies needed breakfast

And poems evaporated like English fog

Lifting off the Devon trees.

The oven.

It was the confluence of things.

It was the confluence and coincidence

Everything gone wrong.

She’d been frightened,

And losing too long.

She’d been losing when she was supposed to be winning

All those long years between eight and thirty.

College, scholarships, but

She misplaced things. And, besides

She missed her daddy.

Besides, how should one live with Ted?

Complete the competing desires for a little madness,

The sublime? The constant need need need

As he dreams of Alissa, his well paid job

While staring at babies, burnt toast, tea cups?

Burnt toast and tea cups,

She ponders working,

But still, the wine glasses, the spills,

The laundry piled as nasty as traffic.

The Devon fog, the lost poems

The morning and the laundry,

The fear and what was poetry for?

Three Poems about Nothing

I: The Nun In Me

The nun in me isn’t very pure

Quite the opposite. This paramour

Is a nasty seductress shaking

Up decadent cocktails of vice.

The nun in me isn’t very nice

Wandering out late, scheming

Skating with an ethereal lover,

A faceless man with sexy moves,

Her shadowy full moon accomplice.

The nun in me isn’t very devoted

Running plotting against every angel

Who seems an obvious guide. Wanting, wanton

Stuffed full of wine and avarice.

The nun in me behaves badly, in fact she’s better

On her own – where there’s no one to push,

No fights to incite.

She’s not very good at marriage,

To be precise.

Still, the nun in me craves a warm fire, my devoted spouse

And loves our all-black kitty. She imagines us three wildly careening

Like sightless bats through a long, dark tunnel of our own design,

Flying by feeling, sensing the way home.

II: The “Nun” in me

Hebrew letters are numbers

And the inverse of the obverse is true.

The Torah is duality; calligraphed black

And all of the white space too.

And Nun has just my number – it’s fifty

Fruitful and vibrant,

The gate of faith itself.

III: The “None” in me

Am I empty enough? A circle with no center?

I want nothing, really, except everything

And in small doses, and all at once.

Is the none in me empty enough?

I’ve said my prayers, sat on my cushion,

I’ve stayed alert and relaxed.

Is the none in me empty enough?

Wasn’t it you who told me

The world was seamless

And that went for the lampshade too.

Later, you apologized but why?

Was that before or after you said you loved me

Once? In this lifetime,

Once was just enough.

Am I empty enough yet?

The everything

In me become the ‘none?’

© Copyright, 2014, Joan Gelfand..
All Rights Reserved.