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.