Who is Sylvia?

“And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty. And like the cat
I have nine times to die.”

A snowy night in February, 1956, when Sylvia Plath
first drunk in this bar, in this same pub in Cambridge,
so the plaque on the wall says.

Maybe some of her genius will rub off on me, and
maybe she sat on this very chair, drinking
a ‘lethal line’ of Whisky Macs...

listening to the ‘syncopated strut’ of a piano
and the siren call of the trumpet... and then in walked
‘a hunky boy’ called Ted Hughes

so she recorded in her diary...the attraction, instant;
he kissed her – ‘smack-bang’ on the mouth...ripped off
her hair-band and earrings – ‘barked, these he would keep’!

And so, she bit him ‘long and hard’ on the cheek;
she in her early twenties...and me, then, just a kid.
I can picture her now – grey eyes brown hair dyed blond...

although, at the time, I’d no idea of her existence, until
that day I came across her – stumbling on her ‘Colossus’
in a book shop in Wood Green; hungry to learn – a freckled-faced
teen peering out from the early sixties.

“Counting the red stars and those of plum colour. The sun
rises under the pillar of your tongue – my hours married to shadow...”

Her poetry transporting me from London, N.15 – with its hotchpotch
of bomb-sites and back-to-backs, thus read on, the girl who rode
a number 14 bus from the municipal baths to her gran’s house,
but only a cat knows when to walk away.