Three Women

Ted Hughes wrote the same poem

for Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill,

but it was his third wife he loved most.

She did not die of her own hand or

say to Ted, Kindly keep your

dick in your pants, as perhaps

his other muses did,

but honestly, who knows her name? 

I am guessing it would be generic,

like Beth or Mary,

a name which Ted might never see fit

to include in his poems.

My encyclopedia informs me:

Ted Hughes married Carol Orchard,

a nurse, in August 1970.  They

remained together until his death

on October 28, 1998.

There must only be two kinds

of people in the world, those who write

the same poem for two women,

thinking years later, Oh, maybe they are

not so similar after all, and those

who can only aspire to love the

same woman for life and fuck

her interchangeable bodies day

by month by year.  And then years.

This was Ted the animal, or you,

or I, or the next person boarding

the red eye flight to the city.

Birth

I.

Sadness was planted in my belly like a tulip bulb.

When I was a little girl I ate clover leaves from my front yard

thinking it romantic, thinking myself an explorer.

Years later, when that bulb took root I began to wonder,

how much of this lesion is due to my eating habits at 6 years?

The dark bulb has grown in me with those pregnancy scares,

those faucets unbidden in my eyes turned on, on without regulation.

Romantic: Is how those faucets watered the growing flowers.

Darling Dr. So & So tells me birth is inevitable.

But when?  But where?  He will not say.

I ask my mother, posing a hypothetical.  If your Dr. Roberts

had told you, you could have me in 9 months, 9 years, or 9 days,

Which would you have chosen?  She is worried, glancing at my belly.

II.

Irony is: I am waiting for May.  For the lilies of the valley,

for the daffodils, for the advent of the crocus.  Romantic again:

Is my view out the 3rd story window of my apartment.

My lazy wonderment, What flowers would have grown here

had this building never been dreamt by the proud architect?

There are nights, days, when the bulb

-- Twins! Dr. So & So exclaimed last week --

correction, bulbs, wail me into existence, my hands pressing

into those fat growths, willing them wait for the crocuses!

But May arrives early this year, and sirens scream me across

the Ohio, into the paper blank room where I squeeze my

tulips out into waiting arms and hands.  Twins, Dr. So & So states

again.  They are so beautiful, but you have lost each one.

trevor newberry