Tristan und Isolde

My goodness, how the months go by. The days are long and stressful, but the seasons fly away like sparrows chased by the housecats.

In an instant gone.

So again it happens that school is out for summer, and you, a parent, a grandparent, a friend picking up the child of a friend, whatever... there they are, chatting away in a frenzy of young concerns about summer plans, or no plans at all, same thing, really, in the rear of your vehicle, and maybe you have a little bit of a headache. It's probably the sun. You take a long cool draw on your frosty Starbucks but nothing gets better.

You hate "talking to the box" but the young ones insist and at the drive-thru they order, via your adult voice and filter of knowing better, enough fully hydrogenated fatty acids to sink a Wagner opera, already saturated with full-blown high voices and drama like the ER on a holiday weekend night, like the controlled chaos of the telemetry unit.

Dramatic sopranos scream as you order them fries.

Kids. Sheesh.

You skirt the highway and go back through the neighborhoods, admiring the fruit trees and old architecture of the homes there. Citrus oils perfume the air.

While you drive a hand slips around your throat from behind, a large menacing hand, not the grip of one of the little children in the seats behind you. Then a blade is neatly drawn across the front of your neck, throat slit, circulation to the brain severed, and all goes dim as at the end of a long but satisfying narrative.

Mad Girl's Love Song

By Sylvia Plath
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Strangely this poem does not appear in Ted Hughes' collection of Sylvia Plath's "complete" poems, but to many people it is quite familiar as it shows up in the end-notes to "The Bell Jar" in American editions.

What have we to fear the most? Is it love? Not death?

I fear neither.

I think about both daily.

It's the structure, man, a villanelle, the way it all hangs together. It's like, dude, totally old, like before a freakin sonnet or something. Hey, here's a note... Dude, *duck!*

Note to self: Duck!