Doubletake

“One is left wondering,

"What happened to Doubletake?"

—Anna Journey, After Ariel:

An Argument for Sylvia Plath's

Phantom Third Poetry Collection,

Plath Profiles 5

The Doubletake was Fitzroy Road—

Sylvia’s flat in dead-end London

The Doubletake began then—

What if it had been me?

My head shoved in the oven—

Beholding myself in the morgue?

Sylvia does not speak afterwards—

The Chalk Farm Station disappears

Reading my obituary in the Times—

It’s not really like Plath this time

Death by gas vapors for me—

That was much too easy a way

She waited until Assia and—

I made love when she was gone

Supposedly to give a reading—

“Big Bad Daddy” for the BBC

I was naked, running a bath—

She came up behind me

I fell down into the tumult—

Of falling water when she shot me

This is the last time she said—

The last time you’ll fail me

Immersed in the bathtub’s—

Running water, I was a dead pike

Assia came running in—

Screaming hysterically as usual

A beautiful witch goddess—

With a nice hole between her eyes

The privilege of intimacy—

There was no difference anymore

Sylvia was the poet myth maker now—

Our dead dyad buried in daffodils