Memorial

Sylvia Plath

Η Sylvia Plath γεννήθηκε το 1932 στις Η.Π.Α. Το 1956 παίρνει υποτροφία για να συνεχίσει τις σπουδές της στο Cambridge. Τον ίδιο χρόνο θα γνωρίσει τον άγγλο ποιητή Ted Hughes, τον οποίον θα παντρευτεί λίγους μήνες αργότερα και με τον οποίον θα αποκτήσει δύο παιδιά. Εντούτοις, οι σχέσεις μεταξύ των δύο συζύγων χειροτερεύουν διαρκώς και τελικά θα χωρίσουν στα τέλη του 1962. Εν συνεχεία η Plath με τα παιδιά μετακομίζουν στο Λονδίνο όπου στις 11 Φεβρουαρίου του 1963 θα αυτοκτονήσει τοποθετώντας το κεφάλι της στο φούρνο και ανοίγοντας το γκάζι.

Suicide of Egg Rock

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled

On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,

Gas tanks, factory stacks – the landscape

Of imperfections his bowels were part of –

Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.

Sun struck the water like a damnation.

No pit of shadow to crawl into,

And his blood beating the old tattoo

I am, I am, I am. Children

Were squealing where combers broke and spindrift

Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.

A mongrel working his legs to a gallop

Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.

He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,

His body beached with the sea’s garbage,

A machine to breathe and beat forever.

Flies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole

Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.

The words in his book wormed off the pages.

Everything glittered like blank paper.

Everything shrank in the sun’s corrosive

Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.

He heard when he walked into the water.

The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.

The Stones

This is the city where men are mended.

I lie on a great anvil.

The flat blue sky-circle

Flew off like the hat of a doll

When I fell out of the light. I entered

The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

The mother of pestles diminished me.

I became a still pebble.

The stones of the belly were peaceable,

The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.

Only the mouth-hole piped out,

Importunate cricket

In a quarry of silences.

The people of the city heard it.

They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate,

The mouth-hole crying their locations.

Drunk as a foetus

I suck at the paps of darkness.

The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away.

The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry

Open one stone eye.

This is the after-hell: I see the light.

A wind unstoppers the chamber

Of the ear, old worrier.

Water mollifies the flint lip,

And daylight lays its sameness on the wall.

The grafters are cheerful,

Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers.

A current agitates the wires

Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures.

A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.

The storerooms are full of hearts.

This is the city of spare parts.

My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber.

Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.

On Fridays the little children come

To trade their hooks for hands.

Dead me leave eyes for others.

Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

The vase, reconstructed, houses

The elusive rose.

Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.

My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.

I shall be good as new.

Insomniac

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

Letting in the light, peephole after peephole –

A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus

He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness

Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie

Exposes embarrassments – the mizzling days

Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,

Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,

A garden of buggy roses that made him cry.

His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.

Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film

stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue –

How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!

Those sugary planets whose influence won for him

A life baptized in no-life for a while,

And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.

Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.

Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of gray mirrors.

Each gesture flees immediately down an alley

Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance

Drains like water out the hole at the far end.

He lives without privacy in a lidless room,

The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open

On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats

Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.

Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,

Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.

The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,

And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,

Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.