Sabrina

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Sabrina


Sabrina, fair phenom of black and white
Whose monsters waltzed in right, together, right;
You took to me at Genesee, three days
Of flashlight moon, stage fog, and tulle.
You wove erect as though your mind belonged
To some black bell-view candle sermon sect.
Rung high, hung, towered gothic funeral gong,
Not well! you cried, and pushed me down the coiled
stairwell of my normalcy.

We lay cloistered at Genesee with your
Tasmanian sister, your bruised up thigh.
You rubbed your wrists against a stitch, assumed
The Surgeon and Diagnostic, each notch
A threaded fable—alien encounter,
Cinematic pursuit—the matter of
Your fact hastening my humble jury.

Sabrina, worried on Michelle, on boys,
Nailed pagan crosses above all your doors.
You were mine to guard at Genesee.
A three-day savior, my strange sanity,
Playing pop-songs in your small rear-view,
While hungry scientologists chased you.
Wilis quaked under your pillowed head.
You feared your bed, held my hand, kept watch…
Like a fox with a scent of smoke, perched on a rock.


[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2008]

Ouija

excerpt from "Ouija" by Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath as a young
married couple at 55 Eltisley Avenue

He preferred to talk about poetry. He made poems.
He spelled one out:

‘Nameless he shall be

The myriad of daughters
Tending his image
Washing the mountain slopes with tears
To slake the parched plains’.

‘Is that a good poem?’

I asked him. ‘That poem’, he declared,
‘Is a great poem.’ His favourite poet
Was Shakespeare. His favorite poem King Lear.
And his favourite line in King Lear? ‘Never
Never never never never’—but
He could not remember what followed.
We remembered but he could not remember.
When we pressed him he circled, baffled, then:
‘Why shall I ever be perplexed thus?
I’d hack my arm off like a rotten branch
Had it betrayed me as my memory.’
Where did he find that? Or did he invent it?
It was an odd joke. He liked jokes.
More often serious. Once, as we bent there, I asked:
‘Shall we be famous?’ and you snatched your hand upwards
As if something had grabbed it from under.
Your tears flashed, your face was contorted,
Your voice cracked, it was thunder and flash together:
‘And give yourself to the glare? Is that what you want?
Why should you want to be famous?
Don’t you see—fame will ruin everything.’
I was stunned. I thought I had joined
Your association of ambition
To please you and your mother,
To fulfill your mother’s ambition
That we be ambitious. Otherwise
I’d be fishing off a rock
In Western Australia. So it seemed suddenly. You wept.
You wouldn’t go on with Ouija. Nothing
I could think of could explain
Your shock and crying. Only
Maybe you’d picked up a whisper that I could not,
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
‘Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.’

Three Kisses

by Alfred Eisenstaedt

in spite of everything

Alfred Eisenstaedt

27 by e.e. cummings


in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

--before leaving my room
i turn, and(stooping
through the morning)kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

Please Don't Kiss Me

"We are all tied to our destiny and there is no way we can liberate ourselves."

- Rita Hayworth

My Old Man

Nauset

Sylvia Plath works on her typewriter perched on a stone wall in Yorkshire, England in 1956.

Nauset


Nauset was your periscope.
It held out what all you wrote,
Lantern-pages, pipe smoke.smoke-signals. pages.
The waves waxed and receded like the sea was hormonal
and it shook you, didn’t it? It quaked you.

You had liner notes spread on the floor
for cushions,
Heaps of letters and others’ fortunes and
Tickets, that you’d saved to use for kindling.

A patchwork sea you’d make of scraps and loose news
And, didn’t you?
With those right and pious science minds
who’d roam,
And fluff and ponder and deny your I.
You were elevator music in those days, limp
And see-through; straight through glasses and lenses
And mirrors too, my darling, mirrors too.

Nauset held it like a keyhole. while you
Sifted, shifty, flint without the stone.


[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2007.]