KATHE KOJA LADY LAZARUS * Kathe writes, "Sylvia Plath is a great favorite of mine:genius and ferocity, a pure velocity of attack; what might she have done with those years since her death? The famous quote from A. Alvarez --'Poetry of this order is a murderous art'-- dovetails with Robert Lowell's summation, in the introduction to Ariel: 'Her art's immortality is life's disintegration.' But I prefer Nabokov in Pale Fire: 'We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sin.'" The maisonette was cold, had been cold, it was cold all over London in this winter where every pain was shaped and clear and made of purest ice. Hands on the table, hands on her head, flat hands with palms as still and cold as sarcophagus marble, my Christ was she going to cry again? No. No. She would not cry for him or anyone, bastard, bastard and her, that woman, she hoped they both died, spending her money in Spain, she hoped they were both dead. The children were asleep; she had just checked them, dim peaceful faces and they did not know about their father, did not know they were better off without him, better off if he were dead. Ach, du. Like voices in her head, auditory hallucinations. She did not have them; shock treatments, yes, but she did not have voices in her head or if she did it was poetry's own voice, not the muse but the bloody angel that flies behind it, no hands at all but talons springing bright as broken bones from the seamless flesh of its arms. She had written three poems this week, might write three more; or thirty; they would make her name, she had written that to her mother. Long letters to her mother like blood trailing on the floor, blood on the ice freezing like jelly and she with a stick to pick it up, messing it back and forth in divination and someone -- her husband? her father? -- pushing the stick from her hands, her cold hands empty again and the stick snapped in half like a broken bone, its lines like runes, instructions in dark angles so subtle and opaque that no one could fail to understand. Voodoo dolls, magic mirrors broken in slivers and slats like the gates of hell, the gates of heaven, all of it power and glory but who had the power, really, and the glory that comes with it like stink comes with shit, who? Not her, there at the table, not her with her head in her hands. It was two thirty in the morning, temperatures falling cold as old stones, old black stones and she had been trying to write, write a new poem about old black stones. The rooms were clean and quiet; toys and clothes in order, kitchen clean, three cups and one tray of uncooked muffins lying like sacrifice on the minuscule counter. She thought she heard her neighbor stir, downstairs; she thought she heard the baby breathe, his whole pink body one susurrating whisper; thought she heard her daughter sigh in the midst of a dream. Little girls are born with dreams, cuffed needs inside like little eggs waiting to drop, fall fat like fruit, like the seeds of babies; but they don't need them. What they need are weapons, armies; they need to be armies, they need to be able to fight. Little boys are taught how to do that; it is a knowledge assumed as necessary as knowing how to point your penis when you piss. team how to fight, hit, throw stones, black stones like pennies on her eyes, she would lie m a grave like a trundle bed and who would care then? Not him. Her hand on the paper like automatic writing, like using the planchette, its little needle the pointy nose of some feared pet, grave weasel, ferreting out the damned: you, and you. And you, especially; you didn't think we would forget you. She had been writing, trying to write since midnight, since two; she had talked to her neighbor, his face swarming out of the light belowstairs like some bewildered god, a modern god left without magic in the normal miracle of electricity. She had wanted to borrow some stamps; he had asked her if she was all right: "You aren't really well, are you?" Are you? Did he see somewhere in her face the shadow of the stones, did he see black spots left behind, little cancerous spores like pits left burned by feet made of acid, what did he see? There on the paper before her, the word, spore; or was it spoor? How cold it was in here, it was hard to see the paper, harder still to hold the pen. I'm fine, she had said; don't call the doctor, I'm fine. So many doctors; this new one was not bad, he seemed to understand, so many pressures on her and he seemed to understand: work, and the children; the paralytic cold. Of her other difficulties, of her husband and that woman, he was sympathetic, he was not unkind. Again and again he reminded her of her children, of her friends, her mother and brother, the people who cared: like an army of love, massed around her to give her strength. She needed strength, now more than ever; given at times to anger but at heart she was not a fighter; better, perhaps, if she had been. Little girl dreams; and flung stones; it was cold enough to freeze stones in here, sacks of ice split open to show like a pearl the motionless heart. She had always hated the cold. Little girl days, watching the ocean; the spray like the sparkle of weapons, tips of arrows shining in the sun. Her dead father underground, no light for him. She felt her hand move across the paper, felt the pen as if it were another finger, sweet and special deformity; it was her talent, her genius, it was what allowed her to write. Did everyone have something like that, some rich handicap that in paradox freed its host? Her husband, what was his deformity? A penis that hissed like a snake, a fat red snake with one hot eye? and hers, what was hers, patent-leather bitch with her heavy scent and her voice like a man's, what did she have that made her special? Besides him? Her hand distracting moving again and she read the line aloud to herself like honey on the tongue: read it again but softly, she did not want to wake the children, wake her neighbor below stairs; he needed his sleep. She needed sleep, too, but she needed this more. Black stones, the poem told her, were in essence secret monuments to suffering scattered across the unforgiving earth as grave markers for sadnesses and sorrows yet to be: and the job of each to find and gather the stones belonging to him, to her, to pile them in a cairn that was itself a monument to the human capacity for self-inflicted pain. And what -- pen in hand and in the dark, what is in your pike, what lies in half-completion waiting agonies to be? The baby made a noise; a car passed outside. Her bladder ached lightly and she stood for a moment, one hand on the chair's back, the other on her own, pressing where the pain seemed to be. So many pains below the surface; so many spots she could not reach. On the chair, draped like mockery the party dress, blue bodice glittering false and sweet; she looked away; she looked down. Sitting in the ear, hands in her lap she had been sitting in the car and suddenly there was her neighbor, knocking on the window, was she all right? People were always asking her that; was she? The blue bodice tight as a secret against her heart and she had told him she was fine, then too, just fine; I'm thinking she had said. I'm going on a nice long holiday, a long rest. She might have said, I'm going off to war; for war you need weapons; perhaps that was in the poem, too, hidden like a snake in the pile of stones. So many stones. Here a stone for her father's death, dark sugary light surrounding it like infrared; red-eyed and eight years old, she had composed a document for her mother to sign: I WILL NEVER MARRY AGAIN. What a big stone that was, yet unheavy; without trying she could lift it with the bent tip of her nail. Beside it another stone for her mother, a small one shaped like a kidney; and a smaller stone still, for a baby unborn. More--so many? -- for men, most so small her own sad contempt might have goaded her into overlooking them had she not stumbled, stubbed her toes (like her father, in fact, before her, and what were those red marks creeping like unhealed scars up her legs?), understanding like a job begun in the vertiginous moment that these stones too were hers to carry and to keep. In her hands they were not so heavy, though walking in the cold made them more so, the long cold shadow born of the darkness of the biggest stone of all. That one she deliberately sidestepped, big and black as a monument itself, heavy as the weight of his body in the dark; it was, she thought (and said; did she say it aloud?) no longer hers to carry: let her carry it instead, the covetous bitch, let her bear the burden now. Other stones -- the New Yorker disappointments, the O'Connor class, all of it now as if seen from a painless distance, yet the edges of each stone still shone with a particular and vindictive clarity, as if they had been freshly sharpened not an hour before. Newer rejections (as he, the bastard, was basking in light) made their own pile, their own deadly memorial heap and beyond them more, a field of them, a waterless strand: her poverty, her loneliness, even the cold made a carpet of black all the way to the horizon, an endlessness like the tears of the dying of those who die alone. Despairing of bearing them, she let fall the ones in her arms; there were too many, it was all too much, an army equipped with a pile this big fierce black edges like excised teeth and the world itself one howling mouth, velvet-dark like the jaws of a guard dog, slick and scentless, dangerously cold. You could burn to death, in cold like that. The baby began whimpering in earnest; she rose, back twingeing, to check on him, moving quiet and surely as upon the surface of a lake, frozen water slick and hard as promises, depthless as the edge of the knife, the smile in the darkness, the heavy scent of gas. Now it was three thirty, quarter to four; she had thought of making coffee, tea, something hot but in the end the poem held her, kept her cramping hands busy. What if-- head to one side, sinusitis ache but she was too busy, now, to notice -- what if there were a way to make of the stones more than monuments, what if instead they were weapons, but weapons to be used on others rather than self? And take the step, not a long step at all, a logical motion to make of the stones themselves an army, who was it sowed the dragon's teeth? She did not remember, English major, Smith girl, she should remember. Perhaps the poem itself was a stone. Perhaps it was her stone, perhaps she ought to throw it at someone, good and hard, no secret about that and she almost laughed; or did she? Did the baby stir? Sweet baby, sometimes it was so hard to look after him, to look after them both; fatherless woman with her fatherless children, alone on a plain of black stones. Set the children down awhile, give them your flesh on which to sleep, to make a carpet keeping them from the cold; she loved her children; it was so hard. The pen in her hand moved a moment; she ignored it; stubbornly it moved again and the stones shifted, now they were a path, built deliberate and strong for the wheels of iron, the chariots of the queen: warrior queen, and what a grand tradition that was, bare breasts and hair like eagles, their very gaze enough to split a rock, split the boulders in their paths and beside them the men, running panting, trying to keep up. They knew, those women -- with a smile, there was no denying it, a smile there in the sober light -- they knew all about war, about tactics and plans, about ways to thwart the enemy even when he lies beside you (and how he lies); they were not fooled, they were not afraid. It was crippling fear, debilitating as the cold; it yeas cold, fear, like a stone on your heart. A warrior queen, what would she do? smash the stone, or the heart it breaks? Smash your head open like a stone, and let the cold brain bleed out like jelly through the cracks. Tired, now, of thinking, the brief exhilaration making her instead ready to weep, like the false gaiety of alcohol, giddy champagne nerves, when had she last drunk champagne? When had she last had reason? To friends she had determinedly crowed in false bravado of her newfound escape from the suffocation of pure domesticity, she was free now, she was doing what she had always wanted to do; her work was tremendous in its new liberation, well that was true, these poems were the best of her life. Her life: what else? Again her thoughts circling, thinking of him, then of her baby boy, a little tyrant too to one woman, one day? -- or more, her mouth turning down again, long tragedian's mask but subtle, subtle, she had suffered so long she knew how it was done, without fanfare, without tears if possible, certainly without the long distorting grimace; a pale frown would do as well, as well. What about him, this boy-baby, her son? and what about her daughter, plump toddler's cheek and trusting eyes, innocent of the need for weapons, she did not even guess there was a war. How to look at such innocence, both of them, neither of them knew a thing about men and women, love and envy, the way it feels when the black millstone grinds against your heart, the way it feels to breathe blood and call it air. How to keep them safe, how to save herself? how to understand, these stones so real she could feel them, feel them in her hands like Medusa's breasts, big, contemptuous and cold. She put her hands to her face and did not cry, but felt somewhere--in the gripe of her belly, the somber turn of the blood in her womb -- the tears, rolling, turning like acid in a vase, the shivering sea undrowned by all the stones in all the world. And how could she change that? Finished, now, with the poem; done thinking anti her hands loose and empty on the table, pen down and paper folded; she had left a note downstairs, pinned to the hallway pram. No solution but an elegance of decision, there was calm in a decision, a space delicious as the pure moments post-fever where the scorched body can relax for a heartbeat's minute before taking up the sterner work of health. She knew what needed to be done, as surely as any warrior queen, sure as the wheels of chariots grinding sparks from the stones below. Turning on the gas, hand on the dial like the hand of the angel who opens at last the book of life, the silent seeping odor and she bent, half-kneeling, to the door, one toweled hand to steady her motion -- she was so tired, up all right and she was so tired -- the other past her bending head, bending as if in benediction to slip into growing warmth the metal tray of muffins, breakfast for the children, for herself: hard little pumpernickel muffins like black stones to be heated till they were soft; and warm; and ready. She filled the three mugs with milk; already it was light outside.