Crossing the Water Read online

  Burns open to sun’s blade.

  On that green altar

  Freely become sun’s bride, the latter

  Grows quick with seed.

  Grass-couched in her labor’s pride,

  She bears a king. Turned bitter

  And sallow as any lemon,

  The other, wry virgin to the last,

  Goes graveward with flesh laid waste,

  Worm-husbanded, yet no woman.

  Who

  The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in,

  Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth.

  October’s the month for storage.

  This shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach:

  Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.

  I am at home here among the dead heads.

  Let me sit in a flowerpot,

  The spiders won’t notice.

  My heart is a stopped geranium.

  If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.

  Dogsbody noses the petals. They bloom upside down.

  They rattle like hydrangea bushes.

  Mouldering heads console me,

  Nailed to the rafters yesterday:

  Inmates who don’t hibernate.

  Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze,

  A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted,

  Their veins white as porkfat.

  O the beauty of usage!

  The orange pumpkins have no eyes.

  These halls are full of women who think they are birds.

  This is a dull school.

  I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet,

  Without dreams of any sort.

  Mother, you are the one mouth

  I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness

  Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.

  I said: I must remember this, being small.

  There were such enormous flowers,

  Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.

  The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry.

  Now they light me up like an electric bulb.

  For weeks I can remember nothing at all.

  Dark House

  This is a dark house, very big.

  I made it myself,

  Cell by cell from a quiet corner,

  Chewing at the grey paper,

  Oozing the glue drops,

  Whistling, wiggling my ears,

  Thinking of something else.

  It has so many cellars,

  Such eelish delvings!

  I am round as an owl,

  I see by my own light.

  Any day I may litter puppies

  Or mother a horse. My belly moves.

  I must make more maps.

  These marrowy tunnels!

  Moley-handed, I eat my way.

  All-mouth licks up the bushes

  And the pots of meat.

  He lives in an old well,

  A stoney hole. He’s to blame.

  He’s a fat sort.

  Pebble smells, turnipy chambers.

  Small nostrils are breathing.

  Little humble loves!

  Footlings, boneless as noses,

  It is warm and tolerable

  In the bowel of the root.

  Here’s a cuddly mother.

  Maenad

  Once I was ordinary:

  Sat by my father’s bean tree

  Eating the fingers of wisdom.

  The birds made milk.

  When it thundered I hid under a flat stone.

  The mother of mouths didn’t love me.

  The old man shrank to a doll.

  O I am too big to go backward :

  Birdmilk is feathers,

  The bean leaves are dumb as hands.

  This month is fit for little.

  The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.

  A red tongue is among us.

  Mother, keep out of my barnyard,

  I am becoming another.

  Dog-head, devourer:

  Feed me the berries of dark.

  The lids won’t shut. Time

  Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun

  Its endless glitter.

  I must swallow it all.

  Lady, who are these others in the moon’s vat—

  Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?

  In this light the blood is black.

  Tell me my name.

  The Beast

  He was bullman earlier,

  King of the dish, my lucky animal.

  Breathing was easy in his airy holding.

  The sun sat in his armpit.

  Nothing went moldy. The little invisibles

  Waited on him hand and foot.

  The blue sisters sent me to another school.

  Monkey lived under the dunce cap.

  He kept blowing me kisses.

  I hardly knew him.

  He won’t be got rid of:

  Mumblepaws, teary and sorry,

  Fido Littlesoul, the bowel’s familiar.

  A dustbin’s enough for him.

  The dark’s his bone.

  Call him any name, he’ll come to it.

  Mud-sump, happy sty-face.

  I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish.

  I bed in a fish puddle.

  Down here the sky is always falling.

  Hogwallow’s at the window.

  The star bugs won’t save me this month.

  I housekeep in Time’s gut-end

  Among emmets and mollusks,

  Duchess of Nothing,

  Hairtusk’s bride.

  Witch Burning

  In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks.

  A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit

  The wax image of myself, a doll’s body.

  Sickness begins here: I am a dartboard for witches.

  Only the devil can eat the devil out.

  In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

  It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door,

  The cellar’s belly. They’ve blown my sparkler out.

  A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.

  What large eyes the dead have!

  I am intimate with a hairy spirit.

  Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.

  If I am a little one, I can do no harm.

  If I don’t move about, I’ll knock nothing over. So I said,

  Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.

  They are turning the burners up, ring after ring.

  We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow.

  It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.

  Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:

  I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth.

  Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days

  I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.

  My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.

  I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.

  A Life

  Touch it: it won’t shrink like an eyeball,

  This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.

  Here’s yesterday, last year—

  Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast

  Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

  Flick the glass with your fingernail:

  It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir

  Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.

  The inhabitants are light as cork,

  Every one of them permanently busy.

  At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.

  Never trespassing in bad temper:

  Stalling in midair,

  Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.

  Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

  As Victorian cushions. This family

  Of valentine faces might please a collect
or:

  They ring true, like good china.

  Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.

  The light falls without letup, blindingly.

  A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle

  About a bald hospital saucer.

  It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper

  And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.

  She lives quietly

  With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,

  The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture

  She has one too many dimensions to enter.

  Grief and anger, exorcised,

  Leave her alone now.

  The future is a grey seagull

  Tattling in its cat-voice of departure, departure.

  Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,

  And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,

  Crawls up out of the sea.

  Crossing the Water

  Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.

  Where do the black trees go that drink here?

  Their shadows must cover Canada.

  A little light is filtering from the water flowers.

  Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:

  They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

  Cold worlds shake from the oar.

  The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.

  A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

  Stars open among the lilies.

  Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?

  This is the silence of astounded souls.

  Also by Sylvia Plath

  Ariel

  The Colossus

  PROSE

  The Bell Jar

  Credits

  Cover design by Amy Isbey Duevell

  Copyright

  With a few exceptions the poems in this book were written during the period between the British publication of The Colossus in 1960 and before the Ariel poems were composed in late 1961. Nine of the poems here were published in the British edition of The Colossus (Heinemann, 1960) but excluded from the U.S. edition at the request of the American publisher, Knopf. They are: “Metaphors,” “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” “Maudlin,” “Ouija,” “Two Sisters of Persephone,” and five of a group of seven poems published in the British edition under the title “Poem for a Birthday”: 1. “Who”; 2. “Dark House”; 3. “Maenad”; 4. “The Beast”; and 6. “Witch Burning.” Numbers 5 and 7 of this section (“Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond” and “The Stones”) appeared as separate entities in the Knopf edition of The Colossus.

  The following poems appeared in a limited edition (150 copies) titled Uncollected Poems, issued in 1965 by Turret Books, London: “Wuthering Heights,” “Finisterre,” “Parliament Hill Fields,” “Insomniac,” “I Am Vertical,” “Blackberrying,” “Private Ground,” “Candles,” “A Life,” and “Crossing the Water.”

  “Blackberrying,” “The Babysitters,” “Two Campers in Cloud Country,” “Mirror,” and “On Deck” appeared in The New Yorker. “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Love Letter,” “Widow,” “Heavy Women,” and “Face Lift” appeared in Poetry. “Ouija” appeared in the Hudson Review.

  Other poems in this book appeared in Tri-Quarterly, Harper’s Magazine, The New Statesman, London Magazine, The Listener, New American Review, Partisan Review, and The Texas Quarterly.

  Some of the poems were published in 1971 by the Rainbow Press, London, in a limited edition titled Crystal Gazer.

  CROSSING THE WATER. Copyright © 1971 by Ted Hughes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ISBN: 978-0-06-090789-1

  EPub Edition October 2016 ISBN 9780062669483

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 71-138756

  16 17 18 19 20 OPM 40 39 38

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada

  www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

  Rosedale 0632

  Auckland, New Zealand

  www.harpercollins.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF, UK

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  195 Broadway

  New York, NY 10007

  www.harpercollins.com