Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read online

  An old beast ended in this place:

  A monster of wood and rusty teeth.

  Fire smelted his eyes to lumps

  Of pale blue vitreous stuff, opaque

  As resin drops oozed from pine bark.

  The rafters and struts of his body wear

  Their char of karakul still. I can’t tell

  How long his carcass has foundered under

  The rubbish of summers, the black-leaved falls.

  Now little weeds insinuate

  Soft suede tongues between his bones.

  His armorplate, his toppled stones

  Are an esplanade for crickets.

  I pick and pry like a doctor or

  Archaeologist among

  Iron entrails, enamel bowls,

  The coils and pipes that made him run.

  The small dell eats what ate it once.

  And yet the ichor of the spring

  Proceeds clear as it ever did

  From the broken throat, the marshy lip.

  It flows off below the green and white

  Balustrade of a sag-backed bridge.

  Leaning over, I encounter one

  Blue and improbable person

  Framed in a basketwork of cat-tails.

  O she is gracious and austere,

  Seated beneath the toneless water!

  It is not I, it is not I.

  No animal spoils on her green doorstep.

  And we shall never enter there

  Where the durable ones keep house.

  The stream that hustles us

  Neither nourishes nor heals.

  You’re

  Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

  Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

  Gilled like a fish. A common-sense

  Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.

  Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,

  Trawling your dark as owls do.

  Mute as a turnip from the Fourth

  Of July to All Fools’ Day,

  O high-riser, my little loaf.

  Vague as fog and looked for like mail.

  Farther off than Australia.

  Bent-backed atlas, our traveled prawn.

  Snug as a bud and at home

  Like a sprat in a pickle jug.

  A creel of eels, all ripples.

  Jumpy as a Mexican bean.

  Right, like a well-done sum.

  A clean slate, with your own face on.

  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.

  Morning Song

  Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

  The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

  Took its place among the elements.

  Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

  In a drafty museum, your nakedness

  Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

  I’m no more your mother

  Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

  Effacement at the wind’s hand.

  All night your moth-breath

  Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

  A far sea moves in my ear.

  One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

  In my Victorian nightgown.

  Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

  Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

  Your handful of notes;

  The clear vowels rise like balloons.

  Tulips

  The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

  Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

  I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

  As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

  I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

  I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses

  And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

  They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff

  Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

  Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

  The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

  They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

  Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,

  So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

  My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

  Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

  They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

  Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage –

  My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,

  My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;

  Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

  I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat

  Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

  They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

  Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley

  I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

  Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.

  I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

  I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

  To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

  How free it is, you have no idea how free –

  The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

  And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

  It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

  Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

  The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

  Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe

  Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

  Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

  They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,

  Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,


  A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

  Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

  The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

  Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

  And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

  Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

  And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

  The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

  Before they came the air was calm enough,

  Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

  Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

  Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

  Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

  They concentrate my attention, that was happy

  Playing and resting without committing itself.

  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.

  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 roses 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 gray 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.

  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,

  Gray 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.’

  The Moon and the Yew Tree

  This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

  The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

  The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

  Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their hu
mility.

  Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place

  Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

  I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

  The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

  White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

  It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

  With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

  Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –

  Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.

  At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

  The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

  The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

  The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

  Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

  How I would like to believe in tenderness –

  The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

  Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

  I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

  Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

  Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,

  Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

  Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

  The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

  And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

  Mirror

  I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

  Whatever I see I swallow immediately

  Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

  I am not cruel, only truthful –

  The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

  Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

  It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long