Downright Unnerving

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes' son Nicholas has committed suicide, like his mother and stepmother before him.
Plath and Anne Sexton, another suicide, were early influences on my thinking about women, feminism and poetry. I would say Robert Lowell, too, another "confessional" poet and another suicide, if I remember correctly, except I didn't read much Lowell.
Anyway, the poet/professor that I took a writing course from in college killed himself in the middle of writing a book about all of them.
Phew, I feel like I've escaped a deadly virus.
"Boot boot boot of a brute like you." From Plath's Daddy.
I liked the one about the red tulips in the white hospital room best.

Last stanza:

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.


Wow.