Sylvia Plath's Grave

Things are never what we expect them to be.
Like at the Louvre coming on the Mona Lisa
when we hear in all languages 'Is that it?'

And here at Heptonstall at Sylvia Plath's grave.
What did we expect more than this single stone?
A monument of angels wings clipped in mourning

their eyes streaked by northern rain and rooks?
Anything but this unkept place of soiled grass
and broken domes of glass and paper flowers.

She could have been just anyone and have harbored
this arc of a stone and its line of three black names,

Dido snubbing Aeneas in virgilian eternity

A Second Visit to Sylvia Plath's Grave

Roses have gone dead
All that prickly clan
of dryads

There is talk of roses
Take it for what it is
On the headstone side

We now communicate with dead roses
Bow to all dark ladies
In the rhododendron groves

'Madamoiselles,
I will not bother you
As serious poets do

My songs are not for your fine noses
More for alleyways
Off the rhododendron roads

So my saintly sisters
I cannot tell you what prickles
Adorn this garden wall'

I will write because a black rook
rose out of the grass
Where you lie buried.

^

Biography

Chris Neenan lives in Rome. He lectures on Roman and English literature at John Cabot University. He is also English consultant at Italy's Central Bank. His poetry has appeared frequently in Electric Acorn, Cortland Review and ForPoetry. His translations of the Sulpicia poems will be published in Amphora in Spring 2003.