Ariel by Sylvia Plath ****
Reading dates: 24 June – 24 July 2014
Neil read this book to me, around a poem per night, before sleep. I travelled from thoughts of suicide, to hospitals and bees in vehicles made of words. A star fell because I did not re-read, and this needs re-reading. Of all the poems, this one echoed daily since the day I heard it. It still does.
Thalidomide
O half moon—
Half-brain, luminosity—
Negro, masked like a white,
Your dark
Amputations crawl and appall—
Spidery, unsafe.
What glove
What leatheriness
Has protected
Me from that shadow—
The indelible buds,
Knuckles at shoulder-blades, the
Faces that
Shove into being, dragging
The lopped
Blood-caul of absences.
All night I carpenter
A space for the thing I am given,
A love
Of two wet eyes and a screech.
White spit
Of indifference!
The dark fruits revolve and fall.
The glass cracks across,
The image
Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.
8 November 1962
