SYLVIA

I pulled rain up by the roots.
Demolished the wellsweep.
The drought starts now.

O Sylvia,
your skin stretched taut,
the depths of your eyes,
waving hair
all melted away in the sun
like the wines of Icarus.

I pulled rain up by the roots
Now no plant will take.
The stairway to heaven,
a stairway to night –

Sylvia, you made your climb
to the whiteness of skin,
to cracked glass,
into a net.

I write you a letter
in large scorching characters
on a slick clay bowl
meant to fall apart on cracking.

I write in the colors of evening.
Such slight and tiny small stars,
Sylvia,
in such a delicate vessel.

I pulled up rain by the roots.
Got myself ready for drought.
Sylvia, are there still
larks singing on high
in a bleak, sunless expanse?

Write me too
in letters intimately stillborn,
with the rain pulled up,
the earth parched dry,
a black tear
into my clay bowl.
O Sylvia,
Sylvia.

It's a long time since you left
without even saying goodbye.
At the peak of your bloom.
In your authentic springtime.
Only the beehive is left
(the one you had ordered, remember?)
It still stands.
But the bees are gone.
Flown away, just like you.

No white hand strokes
the pages of
books.
No body lies on the bedplank any more,
its spirit having
stolen away, by way of the window,
in search of a lost home.
Did you get there?
(Is it possible to find
what you've never had?)

O Sylvia,
you left us
lines interwoven
with poppies.
They burn bright red
as if they had your bloodflow,
your ringing voice,
your welcoming voice.

I write my letter
in wistful greeting:
many birthdays have passed
(maybe eternity is timeless).
If you do receive this,
take it as a reminder
of just how many lights
have gone out.

Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

Vitalija Bogutaitė was born at Krakės, near Lithuania's center. She moved west with her family as World War II was ending. Bogutaitė began writing poems while attending high school at a refugee camp in Hanau, Germany. On reaching Baltimore in 1950, she was heartened to discover a number of poets who were already there: Bradūnas, Niliūnas, Radauskas. After her marriage, she continued her studies and on getting an M.A. in 1966 became a high school teacher of chemistry, first in Michigan and later in Louisiana. She now lives in Baton Rouge. Bogutaitė ranks with the leading émigré poets of the so-called landless, vitally disillusioned generation. The present threnody is addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet whose early suicide, which occurred in London in 1963, provoked an enormous controversy (which has not yet subsided) upon the posthumous publication of her mature poems, many of which allude to the unsettling circumstances of her final months.