Ode to Sylvia

Based on the poem Last Words, by Sylvia Plath

You sought whitened future faces
who'd find your tigered box and
speculate your worth…
Gentle guide to inner places, a
victim of the rocks.
Lost little girl on earth.

You sought your muse but found the edge
of your life. Your feet still
the stone sandl'd goddess feet
ancient toppled marble your pledge
of endings did not kill
you, O Sylvia. Nothing 'plete.

because your picture words still shake
dice to throw them awry
such sweet truth to pull us along,
enchanting supper with Miss Drake.
Asylum of the sky.
Accompanying mournful song,

because

Dear Sylvi-eye,
You did not die in that oven box of ends
but live in lullaby
alive and well in a confluence of friends.

Absence

Absence doesn’t do a thing for me.
Doesn’t make my heart grow anything but
weeds, and those weeds grow down into my soul soil
where the worms follow. Like some terrible dow jones
the life in my heart rides bulls and bears,
and the falls and surges blow ulcer holes into who I am.
I’ve fallen off all the cliffs, and I don’t do postcards well.
I can’t just keep chatting. I’m olding. Surely you can see that!
There’s a cruel game when I begin to yearn for what was before, as
if it was ever mine. The illusions become melded, and memories are
cowards, you know. They all run away.
Emptiness cries out over all the steles of my stories and
covers them all, soul sandstorm.
Absence doesn’t do a thing for me.
Doesn’t make my heart grow anything but weeds.
Every dream, every one is, in the end, unpossessable.
In the end, I was made only to come home.

^

Biography

Robert Phelps is a 60-year old Franciscan priest from East Patchogue, New York, USA. He has a chapbook being published in 2002 by a college press in North Carolina, and a couple of poems in other places. He was first published here in Issue 7.