Saturday, April 19, 2025

Reading Sylvia Plath

Poems by Mike Garofalo


Bookstore Dilemma

Barnes and Noble
bookstore browsed—
        the smell of new books
    and coffee brewed,
tasty poetry books to peruse.

Poetry books
        on fifteen shelves:
which one? which one?
My wallet wants to force a choice:
    just one! just one!

Louise Gluck or Sylvia Plath
    which one? which one?
Hungry to meet and hear them speak;
        [ignoring my wallet}
I Bought Both!
Books are alive and talk repeatedly.




 

Entering the Cloud

She went outside, all alone,
opening her birthday present,
alive, she thought, by accident

Deep diving into veils of glass
rain on her last supper's plate
splitting her cold dead soul apart

Feeling the kitchen stove cooking
hearing transparencies unraveling
tasting the rusted bronze shield.

She saw clouds of cotton,
invading armies of carbon monoxide;
somehow she did not mind.

Five moths later
they found her dead,
her head in her oven,

Her eyes wide.
Syliva Plath, a suicide,
gave up her life, gladly,
before the age of 35.

Now she hardly knows herself
in her tiger striped sarcophagus
holding closely her copper pot.
She rests quietly in the dark.

Syliva Plath (1932-1963)
A Birthday Present, 1962,
Last Words, 1961



25 Steps and Beyond: Collected Works
Poetry, Indexes, Anthologies, Research
By Michael P. Garofalo





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