Name-dropping: Sylvia Plath

I am having lunch with Sylvia Plath.

It seems that I am having lunch with a photograph peeled from the wall of a man lovelorn. She is grainy, and though I squint that she may focus, she never does. Parts of her are gone, the spaces between her fingers have disappeared that her hands are like small, smooth plates, cupped ever so slightly, and I think, "How does she hold a pen?" Her hair, once blond, is now the color of smoke seen from a distance.

"Do I want a Ted Hughes?" I ask her.

She only smiles. She does not even look away.

I am having lunch with Sylvia Plath.

She smells like pot roast and gas fumes and never says a thing.

I stand up to leave, she bids me to sit down.

I do not. Instead, I nod to say that she could go on.

In her fingerless hands is a journal. She reads: "Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing." The look she gives me is nothing less than pointed. As in, "There, kid. See?"

"Go on," I mumble.

"There are two opposing poles of wanting nothing: When one is so full and rich and has so many inner worlds that the outer world is not necessary for joy, because joy emanates from the inner core of one's being. When one is dead and rotten inside and there is nothing in the world: not all the woman, food, sun, or mind magic of others that can reach the wormy core of one's gutted soul planet."

I am quiet for a long time, standing there in front of her, my mind assailed with her scent, the non-spaces of her hands, her ashen hair.

"Sylvia," I say. "What the hell does all that have to do with it?"