Folded Back

                         I.

In Plath's late poem "Edge,"
the perfected woman's two dead children
have been folded back into her body.

However one envisions this,
the image is disturbing:
finality of dead against the cosiness of fold

as in a folded blanket; pair of wings;
nesting, protective. Or as in a book
whose pages are folded back to mark a place.

                         II.

Children who emerge from being characters in books
are also folded back into them again,
but with this difference: they are not dead.

Never having lived, they cannot die.
For characters in fiction—grownups too—
the printed page provides the same good matrix

as one of those tall glasses full of water
in which as a child I loved to watch
Japanese paper flowers surprisingly unfold.

The glass once emptied, what was left? Sad shreds
of sopping color that would dry in time
but never would or could again unfurl

like that, could never simply open out,
transform themselves to poppy, peony,
blossom that never was on sea or land.

                         III.

Each paper flower had one and only one
shot at unfolding. To this draconian law
(part of the attraction) add the charming

spice or hint of metamorphosis
flowers in water can hardly help suggesting.
Yesterday, arranging an armload of lilac boughs

in a brimming vase I top up daily
both for the flowers and for two thirsty cats,
and breaking off one stem to shorten it,

I sensed the whole branch quivering: a young girl
condemned to wood, or wooden and yet wounded,
Daphne or Dante's suicidal trees?

I broke the branch and fitted it—her—in among her sisters.
A few loose petals fell and lay there, fragrant,
on the tablecloth. The moment passed.

Or did it? My friend Kathy that same day
found herself in a restaurant lavishly
decorated with forsythia

and pussywillows—masses of cut boughs—
thinking, she told me, not How vernal or How pretty
but They don't know when they've been severed.

                         IV.

Books are never severed; they're transformed
by the kind of metamorphosis
that offers us, amazingly, a choice.

And not us only. Open up the book.
What was folded back and shut within it
emerges, takes on shape and heft, stands up

and strolls away from the abandoned page
without a backward glance. Or shut the book.
Its contents can fit back between the covers

but need not. They are free to keep exploring
the world out there—a world that in its turn
scrutinizes, thirsts for, welcomes, needs them.

But people out of books retain an option:
the refuge, should they need it, of two dimensions,
the power to fold flat and then unfold

again, lie flat, grow full again, again.
Daddy, you can lie back now,
Plath advises in another poem.

(invites, commands, suggests—nurse, mother, jailer).
He doesn't lie back, does he, though?
At least it takes a stake to stop him,

and even then he may pop up to haunt.
Up: from his vampire's grave? From her bad dreams?
Simply from the pages of a book.

                         V.

Let us return to those children, dead or not,
folded back, who seem to whine with hunger
even as they forlornly suck at each

little pitcher of milk, now empty.
Whereas the paper flower in its narrow bath
opens so trustingly! And when the waters

of stillness and attention drain away,
the flower droops, dries, dies—
if that can die which never was alive—

candidly, it seems, without regret.

Copyright © 2003 Rachal Hadas All rights reserved
from Kenyon Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission