"Koja-LadyLazarus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koja Kathe)

KATHE KOJA

LADY LAZARUS

*
Kathe writes, "Sylvia Plath is a great favorite of mine:genius and ferocity, a
pure velocity of attack; what might she have done with those years since her
death? The famous quote from A. Alvarez --'Poetry of this order is a murderous
art'-- dovetails with Robert Lowell's summation, in the introduction to Ariel:
'Her art's immortality is life's disintegration.' But I prefer Nabokov in Pale
Fire: 'We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that
ends all sin.'"

The maisonette was cold, had been cold, it was cold all over London in this
winter where every pain was shaped and clear and made of purest ice. Hands on
the table, hands on her head, flat hands with palms as still and cold as
sarcophagus marble, my Christ was she going to cry again? No. No. She would not
cry for him or anyone, bastard, bastard and her, that woman, she hoped they both
died, spending her money in Spain, she hoped they were both dead. The children
were asleep; she had just checked them, dim peaceful faces and they did not know
about their father, did not know they were better off without him, better off if
he were dead.

Ach, du.

Like voices in her head, auditory hallucinations. She did not have them; shock
treatments, yes, but she did not have voices in her head or if she did it was
poetry's own voice, not the muse but the bloody angel that flies behind it, no
hands at all but talons springing bright as broken bones from the seamless flesh
of its arms. She had written three poems this week, might write three more; or
thirty; they would make her name, she had written that to her mother. Long
letters to her mother like blood trailing on the floor, blood on the ice
freezing like jelly and she with a stick to pick it up, messing it back and
forth in divination and someone -- her husband? her father? -- pushing the stick
from her hands, her cold hands empty again and the stick snapped in half like a
broken bone, its lines like runes, instructions in dark angles so subtle and
opaque that no one could fail to understand. Voodoo dolls, magic mirrors broken
in slivers and slats like the gates of hell, the gates of heaven, all of it
power and glory but who had the power, really, and the glory that comes with it
like stink comes with shit, who? Not her, there at the table, not her with her
head in her hands.

It was two thirty in the morning, temperatures falling cold as old stones, old
black stones and she had been trying to write, write a new poem about old black
stones. The rooms were clean and quiet; toys and clothes in order, kitchen
clean, three cups and one tray of uncooked muffins lying like sacrifice on the
minuscule counter. She thought she heard her neighbor stir, downstairs; she
thought she heard the baby breathe, his whole pink body one susurrating whisper;