The Chop Shop

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby,
the world itself is the bad dream." Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar

Might there have been a Salinger in old Yeat's house?

What do we say to "Yeat's lived here" ? Do we call her

from those clear vowels? Hopelessness never dressed like

Sylvia's shadows.

Ariel's nigger-eyed berries, bloody mouthfuls,

rabbit catchers - images darkness cannot

catch, but slowly imitate. Balloons, queer-moons,

dominate every

letter. Clam-like curlicues in her jerky

scribbles that cocoons would be jealous of. Yet

how did she concieve? Of her special shadows,

Agony answered

all her questions. Myopic owls, we blink wide-

eyed into a one-in-a-million bleeding,

repeating, meditation of insult, intuition,

roses, and kisses.

Shadows marry shadows in Sylvia's asylum.

Laboratory jars are the key to learning

pickled poems, dust to those people doctoring

sheets of blank paper.