mad girl’s love song
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.)”
“art history” by eleanor antin
ART HISTORY
I fall in love with ancient Greece.
I play hookey from school and get to the museum early so I’m the only one in the Greek rooms. Except for the guard, of course. The guard’s a killjoy. But when he isn’t looking I can go up to a youth on a pedestal and stroke his cool white thigh, if I can reach it. I’m pretty short for my age. But I can peek under his tunic. I wish I could slip my hand under there and feel his balls but I’m chicken. I can’t tell if he’s attracted to me. He looks down at me with blind eyes. Ancient Greeks don’t have eyeballs. I pull my hand away before the guard sees me and gets all uptight. But my heart breaks at the loneliness of marble. The poor thing has only one arm, the other one must be on a pedestal in London or in a bank vault in Japan. Cripples every one of them. They’re cemented together, you can see the seams. Some don’t have heads and only half of their chests. I want to comfort them, even though I know that some of them aren’t Greeks. They’re Romans, Romans aren’t as good as Greeks. But what the hell! They’re all in the same boat now. Sometimes the guard catches me feeling them up and throws me out of the museum. But I change my hair style and sneak back.
One day, Comrade Stalin says the ancient Greeks were bad. They didn’t let everybody vote and they looked down their noses at foreigners. “They were stuck up, little Elly. Aristocrats. Their slaves ploughed the fields and baked the bread and sewed those sheets together to cover their naked flesh. Without slaves they would never have invented philosophy.” I think of those great blank eyes staring down at me. It’s clear now what they’re thinking. Send her around to the back. She’s a foreigner, a daughter of Abraham. Out! I’m heartbroken. Tears burn my eyes. “So the museum is off limits, comrade?” “Of course not, little Elly. Culture elevates the soul and makes it sing. Consider the ancient Egyptians. They were working people. Their artists carved bakeries and factories and warehouses and granaries and markets. They valued the labour of the common man.”
So I did, but it wasn’t the same. Knowledge is hard and strewn with bodies. The next time I played hookey I went to the movies.
