Sometimes it is, poor Sylvia,
that we cannot find the answers. They're
not to be found clinking about in the stars,
blowing about in the August wind,
or blooming among the tea flowers, no matter
how scented. No charlatan soothsayer discerns.
No pull of the cards deciphers. If answers come
at all they'll be found deep within yourself, only.
Don't we all prove that countless, wretched
times? But know this, dear Sylvia, even though it's too
late for your sanity and your life, your daddy didn't
die because of you, for you, by you. Death simply
drew the line and pulled him across.

What were you to do when life puzzled you
to the limit, when all poems disappointed,
when the ink failed to flow smoothly,
the pen tore at the paper and the paper
turned to ash before a line could be written down?
What to do when your child's smile failed to ignite
motherhood, when Daddy's image floated in and out, when
emotional pain dragged you terrified under its
black cerement, that cold, wet, smothering grave cloth?

Fear, oh my God, fear, and the doubt that you had,
the whirling about of a shattered mind, bouncing
from this trap to the other - your muted, stifled inner
screams unheard, or worse, unexpressed. Yes,
you found a solution, poor Sylvia, but suicide
doesn't always equate with an answer. You found a
sad poem, a dirge to be exact, something that moves
us, but there is no rhyme to it and the ending is an
enigma, a great puzzle yet to be invoked, understood.

----

I gave your voice to the sun
I tried to catch the stars in my hands
But they fell through and cut me
Sliced my fingers into two

There is nothing in the sky but your silence
Looks like the sun burned the sound of music away
And the stars sparkle on the floor from when they landed here
As for me I am nowhere
Nowhere

I tried to give your voice to the sun
But the sound of music burned away
And the stars, they fell one by one
Cut my hands away
Tried to give you to the sun

Our moon is incompatible
November's cold and grey
You have ***** fingernails
Whereas I try to wash the dirt away

And what I once thought was music
Was just the sound of a thousand shattering stars
And what I once thought was beautiful
Was merely a thousand glittering scar's

You are a silly little man-child
And I am just a little girl
But as for me, I am tired
Of the blunt beauty of this world

I am on Pluto dear
You are on Mars
We sold each other out honey
We destroyed the stars

What hunger drives us out and back
and walking, walking, free of men,
unquenched enough to taste the lack
that set us going out and back again?

From Riverside you turn on Spring
to stalk a night that will not end,
leaf-hurt, gray grieving thing
in darkness spent -- out and back again.

Alone, a million miles from dawn,
small wonder guiltless ghosts pretend
that hunger guides all exiles gone
out and back -- out and back, my friend.