Seeing Sylvia Plath

JULIA GORDON-BRAMER Seeing Sylvia Plath The pictures appear to be mostly black and white, or else false enthusiastic color of those early sixties, and so I try imagining her real, here, in flesh, five years older than my mother. Or maybe me as her, or us as she, the We of teenaged journaling daughters, journeying to a moon-dark side of self. Perhaps she’s reversed my mirror image, become the friend I lost at ambition’s decade gate called Thirty. Nevertheless, this silvery likeness dreamed is never quite right. Vision hinges on familiar and breaks with history’s short memory. I’m told natives had never seen a ship to know pilgrims were more than whales. We are blinded believing what is real, decided upon before it is seen. Anyway, the eyes of this old seer are clouded when close, yet sighted so far, disbelieving depth perceptions as well as tricks of light. So, where and how might she appear? I hear what matters and will not forget the cloaked vowels of her voice, electric soaked pronunciation of her perfect words, this enunciate annunciation of consonants blessed in her syllables, rising in climbing iambs, feet fleeing meters of heavy earth to ears and eyes past death’s shaded breath, caught in the throat. ฀ ฀ JULIA GORDON-BRAMER is the author of Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press). She teaches graduate-level creative writing at Lindenwood University, St. Louis, Missouri, and in 2013 the Riverfront Times voted her St. Louis’s Best Local Poet. ฀ PLATH PROFILES ฀VOLUME 8฀ 2015