Jul 21 2008
Bare thee to the night
Plath. There is Plath hovering around me these days. I have come from a long journey, and my body feels the fatigue of life in a vacuum with wings that takes people places. But there is Plath… and the world, in its slow-pacing death and inevitable pulse of being, takes on a new dimension. On reading her, words heave with full resonance and flailing dissonance. Her tempo, her prose so in tune with the wholeness of life as the protagonist disembodies herself that the text becomes palpable, a skin with thousands of layers that fall down in slow motion. She is nude before New York, a world in itself.
A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.
It was my last night.
I grasped the bundle I carried and pulled at the pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flat of truce, once, twice…The breeze caught it, and I let it go.
A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street and rooftop it would come to rest.
I tugged at the bundle again.
The wind made an effort, but failed, and a batlike shadow sank toward the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.
Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray sraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
I am my own funeral, and the author of my own rebirth. I have fed my soul to the places where I have loved and been loved.
I am my own woman. The next step is life.
