Oracle

Cate Marvin - 1969-

Dead girls don't go the dying route to get known.
You’ll find us anonymous still, splayed in Buicks,
carried swaying like calves, our dead hefts swung
from ankles, wrists, hooked by hands and handed
over to strangers slippery as blackout. Slammed
down, the mud on our dress is black as her dress,
worn out as a throw-rug beneath feet that stomp
out the most intricate weave. It ought not sadden
us, but sober us. Sylvia Plath killed herself. She ate
her sin. Her eye got stuck on a diamond stickpin.
You take Blake over breakfast, only to be bucked
out your skull by a cat-call crossing a parking lot.
Consuming her while reviling her, conditioned to
hate her for her appetite alone: her problem was
she thought too much? Needling an emblem’s ink
onto your wrist, the surest defense a rose to reason
against that bluest vein's insistent wish. Let’s all
us today finger-sweep our cheek-bones with two
blood-marks and ride that terrible train homeward
while looking back at our blackened eyes inside
tiny mirrors fixed inside our plastic compacts. We
could not have known where she began given how
we were, from the start, made to begin where she
ends. In this way, she's no way to make her amends.

You are like a war novel, entirely lacking female characters, except for an occasional letter that makes one of the men cry. I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it’s fallen in love with the floor. My frantic hand can’t find where my leg went. You can play the tourniquet. A tree with white limbs will grow here someday. Or maybe a pup tent that’s collapsed in on itself, it so loves the sleep of men sleeping beneath it. The reason why women dislike war movies may have something to do with why men hate romantic comedies: they are both about war. Perhaps I should live in a pig’s trough. There, I’d be wanted. There, I’d be tasted. When the mail bag drops from the sky and lands heavy on the jungle floor, its letters are prepared to swim away with your tears. One letter reads: I can barely feel furtive. The other: I am diminishing.

You think I like to stand all day, all night, all any kind of light, to be subject only to wind? You are right. If seasons undo me, you are my season. And you are the light making off with its reflection as my stainless steel fins spin. On lawns, on lawns we stand, we windmills make a statement. We turn air, churn air, turning always on waiting for your season. There is no lover more lover than the air. You care, you care as you twist my arms round, till my songs become popsicle and I wing out radiants of light all across suburban lawns. You are right, the churning is for you, for you are right, no one but you I spin for all night, all day, restless for your sight to pass across the lawn, tease grasses, because I so like how you lay above me, how I hovered beneath you, and we learned some other way to say: There you are. You strip the cut, splice it to strips, you mill the wind, you scissor the air into ecstasy until all lawns shimmer with your bluest energy.

Here's my head, in a dank corner of the yard. I lied it off and so off it rolled. It wasn't unbelieving that caused it to drop off my neck and loll down a slope. Perhaps it had a mind of its own, wanted to leave me for a little while. Or it was scared and detached itself from the stalk of my neck as a lizard's tail will desert its body in fright of being caught. The fact is, I never lied. The fact is, I always lied. Before us, we have two mirrors. At times, they say, one must lie in order to survive. I drove by the house, passed it several times, pretending it was not my own. Its windows were red with curtains and the honeyed light cast on the porch did not succeed in luring me back inside. I never lied. I drove by the house, suckling the thought of other lovers like a lozenge. I was pale as a papery birch. I was pure as a brand new pair of underwear. It will be a long while before I touch another. Yet, I always lied, an oil slick on my tongue. I used to think that I was wrong, could not tell the truth for what it was. Yet, one cannot take a lawsuit out on oneself. I would have sworn in court that I believed myself and then felt guilty a long time after. I hated the house and I hated myself. The house fattened with books, made me grow to hate books, when all the while it was only books that never claimed to tell the truth. I hated him and I hated his room, within which his cloud of smoke heaved. I disappeared up narrow stairs, slipped quick beneath the covers. My stomach hurts, I told him, I was tired. I grew my dreams thick through hot nights: dear, flickering flowers. They had eyes which stared, and I found I could not afford their nurture, could not return their stare, Meanwhile, liars began their parade without my asking, strode sidewalks inches before my doorstep. I watched their hulking and strange beauty, their songs pregnant with freedom, and became an other self. I taught children how to curse. I bought children gold pints of liquor. I sold my mind on the street. 1 learned another language. It translates easily. Here's how: What I say is not what I mean, nor is it ever what I meant to say. You must not believe me when I say there's nothing left to love in this world.

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

23-29 October 1962

Sylvia Plath

1981

Poems

Oracle

More by Cate Marvin

Scenes From the Battle of Us

A Windmill Makes A Statement

Lying My Head Off

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Lady Lazarus

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Oracle

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