The Bull Of Bendylaw
---Sylvia Plath
The black bull bellowed
before the sea.
The sea, till that day
orderly,
Hove up against
Bendylaw.
The queen in the
mulberry arbor stared
Stiff as a queen on a
playing card.
The king fingered his
beard.
A blue sea, four horny
bull-feet,
A bull-snouted sea that
wouldn't stay put,
Bucked at the garden
gate.
Along box-lined walks in
the florid sun
Toward the rowdy bellow
and back again
The lords and ladies
ran.
The great bronze gate
began to crack,
The sea broke in at every
crack,
Pellmell, blueblack.
The bull surged up, the
bull surged down,
Not to be stayed by a
daisy chain
Nor by any learned man.
O the king's tidy acre
is under the sea,
And the royal rose in
the bull's belly,
And the bull on the king's
highway.
Pell-mell, blueblack. I don’t know what you know about sadness and I don’t know what I know either. I spend all my time working to be able to communicate my sadness through poetry and the other half of my time trying to cure my sadness. So won’t I arrive at a pure speech of pain just at that moment that I am no longer in pain? Hecht's Paradox. I started a blog, like I told you bleaders last week, called Dear Fonzie because I never had a blog before and the 2 year old and 4 year old I serve switched --goosed by some unknown-- from mommy and daddy to mom and dad. So I figure it’s time.
So, yeah, no, I like Fonzie, I like Schopenhauer, whose name is also Arthur; also he’s cool. I’m just, I like his control of small appliances. My desk is a mess. Get Elizabeth Bishop in here to catalog all this. Honestly? Prescription bottles, make up, a one hit, piles of poetry books and papers, beaded necklaces and the beads to make more, pearls and rocks. A Playboy from 1963 with an interview with Frank Sinatra. John got it for me on ebay. Hell of an interview. I’m writing about Bertrand Russell and Sinatra talks a lot about him here. In the last few months I have read a lot of different books by the Russell family members, all about the same life they lived together. Freaky. Rare that mom, dad, the kids, and friends all write autobiographies. Anyway. I decided today I’d just say what was on my spine, and so I have.
Am I ashamed? Of course. If you were coming over I’d have cleaned all this up. But I have decided that embarrassment may be the royal road to truth. Is this mike still on? Well look, a flood came up in Bendylaw and broke through the town walls. It put the whole town deep in the underground of underwater. People think a flood will maybe put you on your roof, your whole world ruined, but you don’t consider the flood coming on like a big black bull, and never stopping, never receding, covering your world, you become a starfish, cartwheeling like Da Vinci, and everything we thought so great, the neat land, the queen's flower, and the king's long road, all reputation, is all in sea change, and getting rich. And strange.
Consider also the seal, who does fine if things get watery. Here she is in Brooklyn's Prospect Park Zoo, living by her wits. Is she not sleek?
xoxjmh
