Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –   A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for By a sky   Palely and flamily Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers.   O [...]

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Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?   You flicker.  I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames.  Nothing burns.   And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.   A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts! [...]

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Waking in Winter

Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.  ~ Sylvia Plath  

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The Trees of the Mind

While conducting research for a current essay project on identity and self-definition in the works of Virginia Woolf, I keep stumbling over the roots of Sylvia Plath’s trees – the shriveling figs and ancient yews, black pine and seeding winter trees, the diseased elm, and Polly’s dream tree, a “thicket of sticks” with a larkspur [...]

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Branches of Figs

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.  From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was [...]

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