Crossing the Water Read online

  Contents

  Wuthering Heights

  Finisterre

  Face Lift

  Parliament Hill Fields

  Heavy Women

  Insomniac

  I Am Vertical

  Blackberrying

  The Babysitters

  In Plaster

  Leaving Early

  Stillborn

  Private Ground

  Widow

  Candles

  Magi

  Love Letter

  Small Hours

  Sleep in the Mojave Desert

  The Surgeon at 2 A.M.

  Two Campers in Cloud Country

  Mirror

  On Deck

  Whitsun

  Zoo Keeper’s Wife

  Last Words

  Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  Metaphors

  Maudlin

  Ouija

  Two Sisters of Persephone

  Who

  Dark House

  Maenad

  The Beast

  Witch Burning

  A Life

  Crossing the Water

  Also by Sylvia Plath

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Wuthering Heights

  The horizons ring me like faggots,

  Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.

  Touched by a match, they might warm me,

  And their fine lines singe

  The air to orange

  Before the distances they pin evaporate,

  Weighting the pale sky with a solider color.

  But they only dissolve and dissolve

  Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

  There is no life higher than the grasstops

  Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

  Pours by like destiny, bending

  Everything in one direction.

  I can feel it trying

  To funnel my heat away.

  If I pay the roots of the heather

  Too close attention, they will invite me

  To whiten my bones among them.

  The sheep know where they are,

  Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

  Grey as the weather.

  The black slots of their pupils take me in.

  It is like being mailed into space,

  A thin, silly message.

  They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,

  All wig curls and yellow teeth

  And hard, marbly baas.

  I come to wheel ruts, and water

  Limpid as the solitudes

  That flee through my fingers.

  Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;

  Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.

  Of people the air only

  Remembers a few odd syllables.

  It rehearses them moaningly:

  Black stone, black stone.

  The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

  Among all horizontals.

  The grass is beating its head distractedly.

  It is too delicate

  For a life in such company;

  Darkness terrifies it.

  Now, in valleys narrow

  And black as purses, the house lights

  Gleam like small change.

  Finisterre

  This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,

  Cramped on nothing. Black

  Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding

  With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,

  Whitened by the faces of the drowned.

  Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks—

  Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.

  The sea cannons into their ear, but they don’t budge.

  Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.

  The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells

  Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,

  Almost too small for the mists to bother with.

  The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia—

  Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.

  They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.

  They go up without hope, like sighs.

  I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.

  When they free me, I am beaded with tears.

  Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is striding toward the horizon,

  Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.

  A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot

  A peasant woman in black

  Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.

  Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is three times life size,

  Her lips sweet with divinity.

  She does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying—

  She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.

  Gull-colored laces flap in the sea drafts

  Beside the postcard stalls.

  The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told:

  “These are the pretty trinkets the sea hides,

  Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.

  They do not come from the Bay of the Dead down there,

  But from another place, tropical and blue,

  We have never been to.

  These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold.”

  Face Lift

  You bring me good news from the clinic,

  Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white

  Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right.

  When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist

  Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault

  Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.

  Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.

  O I was sick.

  They’ve changed all that. Traveling

  Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,

  Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,

  I roll to an anteroom where a kind man

  Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious

  Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two

  Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard . . .

  I don’t know a thing.

  For five days I lie in secret,

  Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.

  Even my best friend thinks I’m in the country.

  Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.

  When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I’m twenty,

  Broody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa, my fingers

  Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;

  I hadn’t a cat yet.

  Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady

  I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—

  Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.

  They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.

  Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,

  Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.

  Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,

  Pink and smooth as a baby.

  Parliament Hill Fields

  On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.

  Faceless and pale as china

  The round sky goes on minding its business.

  Your absence is inconspicuous;

  Nobody can tell what I lack.

  Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back

  To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue,

  Settli
ng and stirring like blown paper

  Or the hands of an invalid. The wan

  Sun manages to strike such tin glints

  From the linked ponds that my eyes wince

  And brim; the city melts like sugar.

  A crocodile of small girls

  Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms,

  Opens to swallow me. I’m a stone, a stick,

  One child drops a barrette of pink plastic;

  None of them seem to notice.

  Their shrill, gravelly gossip’s funneled off.

  Now silence after silence offers itself.

  The wind stops my breath like a bandage.

  Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge

  Swaddles roof and tree.

  It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.

  I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.

  Already your doll grip lets go.

  The tumulus, even at noon, guards its black shadow:

  You know me less constant,

  Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird.

  I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy.

  These faithful dark-boughed cypresses

  Brood, rooted in their heaped losses.

  Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat.

  I lose sight of you on your blind journey,

  While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets

  Unspool and spend themselves. My mind runs with them,

  Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem.

  The day empties its images

  Like a cup or a room. The moon’s crook whitens,

  Thin as the skin seaming a scar.

  Now, on the nursery wall,

  The blue night plants, the little pale blue hill

  In your sister’s birthday picture start to glow.

  The orange pompons, the Egyptian papyrus

  Light up. Each rabbit-eared

  Blue shrub behind the glass

  Exhales an indigo nimbus,

  A sort of cellophane balloon.

  The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.

  Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light;

  I enter the lit house.

  Heavy Women

  Irrefutable, beautifully smug

  As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell

  Shawled in blond hair and the salt

  Scrim of a sea breeze, the women

  Settle in their belling dresses.

  Over each weighty stomach a face

  Floats calm as a moon or a cloud.

  Smiling to themselves, they meditate

  Devoutly as the Dutch bulb

  Forming its twenty petals.

  The dark still nurses its secret.

  On the green hill, under the thorn trees,

  They listen for the millennium,

  The knock of the small, new heart.

  Pink-buttocked infants attend them.

  Looping wool, doing nothing in particular,

  They step among the archetypes.

  Dusk hoods them in Mary-blue

  While far off, the axle of winter

  Grinds round, bearing down with the straw,

  The star, the wise grey men.

  Insomniac

  The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

  Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

  Letting in the light, peephole after peephole—

  A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

  Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus

  He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness

  Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

  Over and over the old, granular movie

  Exposes embarrassments—the mizzling days

  Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,

  Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,

  A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.

  His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.

  Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

  He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue—

  How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!

  Those sugary planets whose influence won for him

  A life baptized in no-life for a while,

  And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.

  Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.

  Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

  His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.

  Each gesture flees immediately down an alley

  Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance

  Drains like water out the hole at the far end.

  He lives without privacy in a lidless room,

  The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open

  On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

  Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats

  Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.

  Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,

  Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.

  The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,

  And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,

  Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

  I Am Vertical

  But I would rather be horizontal.

  I am not a tree with my root in the soil

  Sucking up minerals and motherly love

  So that each March I may gleam into leaf,

  Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed

  Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,

  Unknowing I must soon unpetal.

  Compared with me, a tree is immortal

  And a flowerahead not tall, but more startling,

  And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.

  Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,

  The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.

  I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.

  Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping

  I must most perfectly resemble them—

  Thoughts gone dim.

  It is more natural to me, lying down.

  Then the sky and I are in open conversation,

  And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:

  Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

  Blackberrying

  Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,

  Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

  A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

  Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

  Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

  Ebon in the hedges, fat

  With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

  I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

  They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

  Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—

  Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

  Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

  I do not think the sea will appear at all.

  The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

  I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

  Hanging their blue-green bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

  The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.

  One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

  The only thing to come now is the sea.

  From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,

  Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

  These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

&nbs
p; I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me

  To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock

  That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space

  Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths

  Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

  The Babysitters

  It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.

  The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.

  That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.

  We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,

  In the two, huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.

  When the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and Yardley cosmetics,

  I had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,

  And the seven-year-old wouldn’t go out unless his jersey stripes

  Matched the stripes of his socks.

  O it was richness!—eleven rooms and a yacht

  With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water

  And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.

  But I didn’t know how to cook, and babies depressed me.

  Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red

  With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.

  When the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their cruises

  They left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, “for protection,”

  And a small Dalmatian.

  In your house, the main house, you were better off.

  You had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop

  And a cook and a maid, and knew about the key to the bourbon.

  I remember you playing “Ja-Da” in a pink piqué dress

  On the game-room piano, when the “big people” were out,

  And the maid smoked and shot pool under a green-shaded lamp.

  The cook had one walleye and couldn’t sleep, she was so nervous.

  On trial, from Ireland, she burned batch after batch of cookies

  Till she was fired.

  O what has come over us, my sister!