<wakoski's "the water element song for sylvia"> 2004-01-15.8:55 p.m. The Water Element Song for Sylvia Diane Wakoski for Sylvia Plath, a beautiful poet, and my friends, Kathy Saltonstall, J.J. Wilson, and the Martins The fish perhaps they are alewives lie gasping and dying on the edge of the lake. The lake itself is choking and turning into a swamp. For 33 nights I have lain on the edge of this decadent body of water and asked myself questions. For as many days I have counted my attributes and cultivated my serenity; and now has come the time for explanation, definitions being past and formed by life itself, character and blood taking their miserable toll of lives, and I have wept silently and spoken angrily to empty rooms and tried to resist pain without blunting my other feelings. Thus, I feel I must speak of, about, and to Sylvia, who stuck her head in a gas oven out of a similiar despair, who wound two silver clocks at once and found her hands broken under a hankerchief, whose mouth hovered over a canyon in the West on a hot day and refreshment near East jack-in-the-pulpits. A river took her to breakfast. She was a girl carrying the wind in her arms. And I must speak of her beauty and why she died, breaking her own haunting words, like crackers into soup, the breath, a thick silver spoon, melting away in steaming liquid and my urgency is deep and for myself, a rough fish eating up the bottom of a lake, a pledge, an affirmation, and a surly chin stuck out at the world, announcing my attention to survive. Sylvia, you fine-grained piece of white bread, you piece of lace in an attic dress, you crystal glass in a beanery, you satin slippers worn to hike through a muddy wood, you deserved so much and got so little, or were so mistakingly used, as many of us are. But in a classic manner you died in order not to perpetuate this commonness. So this is my day to affirm my survival and my commonness. I am thick Polish rye bread, I am homespun muslin, I am stoneware, I am a pair of wellingtons, I can/ I will survive whether the man I love, who makes me calm on a windy day, goes away or not. I wont wont wont die even for poetry. My children I have already given away, and their lives are better without me. For a woman there is only one thing that makes sense: a man who loves her faithfully & keeps her warm at night. If he goes, her life does not go, but it becomes a book wth none of the pages in the right order. Listen, Sylvia, you beautiful red & bloody tulip in a hospital room, I know how you felt, how the weight of days without your husband was like steel bearings on the eyelids, I know how his denials & betrayals made you feel your body was an empty stained test tube. I know how you counted up your jam jars in the middle of the night waiting for his footsteps. I know how his gravity pulled on you like a diesel truck attached to yr lip, how, like a planet pulled out of its orbit by another body's perturbations, you were flung out into empty space and could not survive its long night of outer darkness. But I wont wont wont die even for purity. Sylvia, I want you to know what happened after you died - poets wept with one eye & laughed with the other, knowing you would no longer be there to astonish them with yr beautiful words, your husband took another wife and left her to gas herself also. publishers and relatives cleaned up on your dead sales, for everyone wants to buy the book of a suicide, Sylvia, they all loved you better dead without your feelings there to chide them for their lack of humanity, they could all talk about you when dead, and not be contradicted by life. Oh, Sylvia, I will never give any of them those satisfactions: no one will gloat over my body and say, "What a pity she didnt live / she might have been a great poet." no one will get the chance to be dramatic & remorseful about not loving me enough, they will have to prove their feelings while I'm living or eat their own shit instead of shovelling it onto my grave, no publisher or relative will clean up on my dead royalties because I'll be living and a man's work is as good when he's living as when he's dead/ I dont want to flutter to the pulse of the best-seller list just because I'm a corpse, and no mustached man will go to talk late at night in bars about how wonderful I was/ he'll have to prove it to me now while I'm living. I wont wont wont die, even for poetry. Oh, no, Sylvia, they all stepped in with their meaness and got fat on it when you killed yourself and I am too spiteful, too angry, too nasty to let the world hypocritically walk on me. If they want to slander me, malign me, treat me brutally, or use me, they'll have to do it in public and with my sharp tongue very much alive and chiding them every minute of the way. You might say I'm too bitchy, my fiber's too common, I'm peasant bread, not a delicate white roll. When I think how many times they have pushed me and how close I have come to that cupboard of cyanide I tremble with rage at those persecutors. Anger, anger, anger, I say, rescue me: let me fight: Fatigue, do not cement me and throw me in the river; Humiliation, if I lose what I love, do not cover my face with a black hood, Sadness, do not crust me with the soot of your windows. I wont wont wont die, for anyone's pleasure. *** Here is our problem, Sylvia: how to feel enough anger to survive and yet not to soil one's ability to love, how to love, open oneself up, be free, and not be destroyed. Is love always a body climbing over a forbidden wall with a spotlight & machine gun on it? Is honesty always suicide? Would we all die like you, if we were honest? *** One pond with one white duck on a grey green day, the waters muddy, not glassy & blue as I remember the Pacific from my childhood. And now a flock of ten white ducks arranged like a slender skiff moving in unison as all the drops of water make rhythmic formations & move like one wave. Now two wild coots, their heads black, bodies brown and streaked with white, come, red-winged blackbirds and crows flying overhead, all life seeks to perpetuate itself, the birds spending their lives searching for food never storing building new houses each year life being day-to-day and never-ending search, only we humans taking time out to wonder whether we want to go on. Sylvia, our brains got too big, our feelings are ripe apples all over the many-limbed body ready to fall off, ready to be shaken off, leaving and empty tree. Simple apple tree, you can lose your fruit, your leaves, live through winter, and be another tree next spring, summer & fall. Your beauty is that simplicity, that dumbness, the insensitivity to pain, the inability to think about pain, that lack of need for a complex & changing identity. There are schizophrenics, I think, madmen who try to turn themselves into trees who stand for hours holding their two meager branches out hoping only to stand there through the seasons being only trees never having to come to terms with knowledge or failure, betrayal, or deceit, one's own anger at inhumanity. Sylvia, with your tongue of bellflowers & chocory, wearing an apron of bees, your white ankles like plover breasts flashing among field grass, Sylvia, whose father called you a kitchen match & struck you to light up his pipe, Sylvia, whose mother used you as a needle to sew the family shrouds, Sylvia, whose husband was the claw of a bear and whose hand stole the honey under that apron of bees, Sylvia, whose children were a cloud of gnats stinging you around the eyes and mouth, irritating you when you wanted to read or speak, oh, Sylvia, who lived in constant terror of being ignored or left behind by the one man you loved, Sylvia, whose life was like mine, with its baby hands asking for love and being slapped by fathers, mechanics & woodsmen, whose fatigue is from trying to hold a house of bricks with no mortar together - as love & being loved can hold our lives together strong & sound in any weather - Sylvia, I wont wont wont go the way you did: I wont die for love, poetry, truth, or a man who betrays me; my grandparents were potato farmers and I have a bit of the simple potato in me. I have been a tree in winter, and I did not scream when the birds flew out of my hair. Living from day to day is a humiliating effort. And for those of us whose dignity is like shoes to wear on a long walk, the bare beeding feet of our failures can give infection, gangrene, loss. How can we recognize our failures and not feel sorry for ourselves? And what feeling is less imbued with dignity than self-pity? Sylvia, you would not fall into that weeping well of abandoned women, so you floated away down some other river. But I wont go with you: you, ring-necked loon, beautyiful thine-noted flute, cup of Li Po's wine, girl with butterflies tattooed on your palm. Your purity which is a kind of poetry is not real is not human and if my life & the pains I have taken with it are to mean anything, I want them to speak for love, for strength, for surviving pain and using the knowledge of it to be compassionate to others. I am as thin as a sheet of cellophane this year. I have no more innocent resistance. I am dry and almost past tears. So, while I do not admire them I will cling to my flaws: my easy anger, my selfish refusal to give that one possession I have left (my life) away, and my spiteful desire to be alive to see my enemies suffer the natural consequences of their own meanness, stupidity & inhumanity. Sylvia, I wont wont wont die. I will not give anyone the pleasure of my voluntary death, tho it would be a relief to get it all over with, not to be alive in case the man I love so much leaves me again, not to be here fighting the battles of honesty & historical confusion. not to have to suffer being alone or rejected or poor one more time, I will go on even if I shred my own thin cellophane self ragged in my sleep at night because I want to believe this pain & suffering have meant something, that I can inspire someone to love me long and faithfully, and that my words, my life, ma give someone else courage to go on. I wont wont wont die even for relief. I wont let the other poets cry with one eye and laugh with the other or relieve anyone of my searching hard but honest questions about them. I wont wont wont die and let the world off easy. Love is fighting the battle, even when you think you might lose. I will go one, for love is the water that cannot be used up, though it be transformed from lake to swamp, to sweat, to tears, to bloody underground stream. Slyvia, when you are dead no one really weeps for you; they weep for themselves. Sylvia, this fish wont die in the gasping lake today. water is life. Water is life, in any form. back /& forth /& frosting names are often sad