THE POEM BOOK

SYLVIA PLATH, AMELIA ROSSELLI, & REETIKA VAZIRANI
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one each from three poets who killed themselves.

SYLVIA PLATH
Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish

_________ 

TPB's notes: when we posted this initially on TPB's facebook page, this was one of the comments we got: 

George Smith The reason artists shouldn't kill themselves, beyond the obvious, is that the fact of the suicide eclipses the work. You have to go back and study it, discard the biographical long enough to see how much more there was, and some are too lazy, or fearful, to do that. 

Indeed this poem surprised us as well. Aside from the suicide, SP comes so easily with so much histrionic we avoided her altogether. Ted Hughes the english poet contributed immensely in the image of her that eclipses her work. Mirror is a gem of a poem.

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AMELIA ROSSELLI
I have twenty days

I have twenty days
to start a revolution: another
twenty days after the revolution
to get to know myself
my little sententious diary.

Words a 
den for
fresh minds,
a raised fist
that guarantees her
my most invincible raison d'être

The enemy tears off her clothes
happiness is a micro-organism inside
unhappiness

in the cemetery
she can't stop being happy

________ 

TPB's notes: translated by Lucia Re and Diana Thow.

___________________

REETIKA VAZIRANI
It's Me, I'm Not Home

It's late in the city and I'm asleep.
You will call again? Did I hear
(please leave a message after the beep)

Chekhov? A loves B. I clap
for joy. B loves C. C won't answer.
In the city it's late, I'm asleep,

and if your face nears me like a familiar map
of homelessness: old world, new hemisphere
(it's me leave a message after the beep),

then romance flies in the final lap
of the relay, I pass the baton you disappear
into the city, it's late and I'm asleep

with marriages again, they tend to drop
by, faithful to us for about a year,
leave a message after the beep,

I'll leave a key for you, play the tape
when you come in, or pick up the receiver.
It's late in the city and I'm asleep.
Please leave a message after the beep.

________

TPB's notes: found note: From WORLD HOTEL (Copper Canyon Press, 2000)