David Trinidad

Last Poem

David Trinidads

Why, today, do I think of Mary,

for Michael Robins

It’s Sylvia Plath’s death day, and I’m writing this on her “little glasstopped table,” a table that was actually in her apartment when she died. (I won it in a Bonhams auction last spring.) She describes it in one of her late letters: “straw & black iron, in which I can put flowerpots & currently have a lilac hyacinth.” I just reread “Edge,” possibly her last poem. (She wrote another, “Balloons,” on the same day.) Is it her death poem? Sounds like it: “The woman is perfected.” And that “smile of accomplishment” I suddenly find haunting. All – is the price of All – . I wonder if I will die with a sense of satisfaction. I’ve been told, by a psychic, that I will. But will I have time to write my death poem? Tim Dlugos did (“D.O.A.”): “Not so bad / for the dead.” Raymond Carver has “Late Fragment.” Ted Berrigan has “Last Poem,” but I don’t think it really was his last. In fact, I know it wasn’t. “Let none regret my end who called me friend.” H.D. wrote her own “Epitaph” before she left. And Allen, “Death & Fame.” Just had to have the final word, didn’t he. In his death poem, Basho¯ dreamt of withered fields. Issa kept his wit till the last: “A bath when you’re born, / a bath when you die, / how stupid.” It’s frigid in Chicago. There’s snow on the ground like there was in London in February 1963. Of course Sylvia has an answer to that: “The snow has no voice.” William Carlos Williams’ collected ends with what seems like a death poem: “Sooner or later / we must come to the end / of striving.” I wonder what poem will end mine. I just reread “Balloons.” Strange to think of the table in my living room as “dead furniture.” Yet Sylvia put live flowers in it! Last week I asked my accountant if the table, or any part of it (shipping was a third of the total cost), was deductible. His response: “Well, I suppose you could say that it inspires you. But no.”

February 11, 2019