On Seeing Sylvia Plath Written on a Wall

Thinking in Rilke and stumbling along
lost, among joggers, drivers—stumblers too,
of a sort—as I tried to meet their eyes
but couldn't, lost as I was. . . . I moved
uphill, heart all awkward striving, toward
some unknown encounter, a boundary
I longed to cross. Then the wall appeared,
solicitous as a child, with its childish scrawl—crumbling,
yet still a piece of dignity in a shaken city—
suffering its own injuries, or the casual
debasement exposure brings, its humble homage
a bolder statement before the rains,
the silent effacement almost erased, the poet's
name, ghost letters receding into stone—

I had almost given up hope in words' trophic
intention intoned. Then the wall reached
out of its igneous solitude: Sylvia Plath—
its plaintiveness, a blip
on the path, reminder of words' necessity,
if only to answer death. I wanted to pick up
its pieces, patch the wounded side, cry out
the testimony, someone's carved remembrance of
weeks? years? ago. . . . before the rains, clearer, bolder. . . .

I can never think of her without the sense,
in equal parts, of horror and awe that suicides inspire.
A glassy grief, a fatal perception seizes me,
a call to that great void where all things
begin—thus the wall's talismanic power—
Turning toward home then I felt alive,
while around me trees and animals lived,
and I let go of uncertainty and certainty,
the quest for words and despair of them, my vain
graspings and concerns. I touched the place of healing—
words . . . and the echoes! traveling off from the center . . .
and I sounded its mantra, as at the pouring
of libation, I cannot but chant poets' names.