Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read online

  Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.

  The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.

  Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.

  If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,

  A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

  Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.

  The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.

  Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.

  She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.

  While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

  Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,

  A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,

  The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.

  The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.

  The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

  I am exhausted, I am exhausted –

  Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.

  I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.

  The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.

  Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

  Daddy

  You do not do, you do not do

  Any more, black shoe

  In which I have lived like a foot

  For thirty years, poor and white,

  Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

  Daddy, I have had to kill you.

  You died before I had time –

  Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

  Ghastly statue with one gray toe

  Big as a Frisco seal

  And a head in the freakish Atlantic

  Where it pours bean green over blue

  In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

  I used to pray to recover you.

  Ach, du.

  In the German tongue, in the Polish town

  Scraped flat by the roller

  Of wars, wars, wars.

  But the name of the town is common.

  My Polack friend

  Says there are a dozen or two.

  So I never could tell where you

  Put your foot, your root,

  I never could talk to you.

  The tongue stuck in my jaw.

  It stuck in a barb wire snare.

  Ich, ich, ich, ich,

  I could hardly speak.

  I thought every German was you.

  And the language obscene

  An engine, an engine

  Chuffing me off like a Jew.

  A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

  I began to talk like a Jew.

  I think I may well be a Jew.

  The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

  Are not very pure or true.

  With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

  And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

  I may be a bit of a Jew.

  I have always been scared of you,

  With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

  And your neat mustache

  And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

  Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You –

  Not God but a swastika

  So black no sky could squeak through.

  Every woman adores a Fascist,

  The boot in the face, the brute

  Brute heart of a brute like you.

  You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

  In the picture I have of you,

  A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

  But no less a devil for that, no not

  Any less the black man who

  Bit my pretty red heart in two.

  I was ten when they buried you.

  At twenty I tried to die

  And get back, back, back to you.

  I thought even the bones would do.

  But they pulled me out of the sack,

  And they stuck me together with glue.

  And then I knew what to do.

  I made a model of you,

  A man in black with a Meinkampf look

  And a love of the rack and the screw.

  And I said I do, I do.

  So daddy, I’m finally through.

  The black telephone’s off at the root,

  The voices just can’t worm through.

  If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –

  The vampire who said he was you

  And drank my blood for a year,

  Seven years, if you want to know.

  Daddy, you can lie back now.

  There’s a stake in your fat black heart

  And the villagers never liked you.

  They are dancing and stamping on you.

  They always knew it was you.

  Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

  Lesbos

  Viciousness in the kitchen!

  The potatoes hiss.

  It is all Hollywood, windowless,

  The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,

  Coy paper strips for doors –

  Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz.

  And I, love, am a pathological liar,

  And my child – look at her, face down on the floor,

  Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear –

  Why she is schizophrenic,

  Her face red and white, a panic,

  You have stuck her kittens outside your window

  In a sort of cement well

  Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.

  You say you can’t stand her,

  The bastard’s a girl.

  You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio

  Clear of voices and history, the staticky

  Noise of the new.

  You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!

  You say I should drown my girl.

  She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.

  The baby smiles, fat snail,

  From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.

  You could eat him. He’s a boy.

  You say your husband is just no good to you.

  His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.

  You have one baby, I have two.

  I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

  I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.

  We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,

  Me and you.

  Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.

  I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

  The smog of cooking, the smog of hell

  Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,

  Our bones, our hair.

  I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.

  The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.

  Once you were beautiful.

  In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: ‘Through?

  Gee baby, you are rare.’

  You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.

  The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.

  I try to keep him in,

  An old pole for the lightning,

  The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.

  He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,

  Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.

  The blue sparks spill,

  Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

  O jewel! O valuable!

  That night the moon

  Dragged its blood bag, sick

  Animal

  Up over the harbor lights.

  And then grew normal,

  Hard and apart and white.

  The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.

  We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,

  Working it like dough, a mulatto body,

  T
he silk grits.

  A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

  Now I am silent, hate

  Up to my neck,

  Thick, thick.

  I do not speak.

  I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,

  I am packing the babies,

  I am packing the sick cats.

  O vase of acid,

  It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.

  He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate

  That opens to the sea

  Where it drives in, white and black,

  Then spews it back.

  Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.

  You are so exhausted.

  Your voice my ear-ring,

  Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.

  That is that. That is that.

  Your peer from the door,

  Sad hag. ‘Every woman’s a whore.

  I can’t communicate.’

  I see your cute décor

  Close on you like the fist of a baby

  Or an anemone, that sea

  Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.

  I am still raw.

  I say I may be back.

  You know what lies are for.

  Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.

  Cut

  for Susan O’Neill Roe

  What a thrill –

  My thumb instead of an onion.

  The top quite gone

  Except for a sort of a hinge

  Of skin,

  A flap like a hat,

  Dead white.

  Then that red plush.

  Little pilgrim,

  The Indian’s axed your scalp.

  Your turkey wattle

  Carpet rolls

  Straight from the heart.

  I step on it,

  Clutching my bottle

  Of pink fizz.

  A celebration, this is.

  Out of a gap

  A million soldiers run,

  Redcoats, every one.

  Whose side are they on?

  O my

  Homunculus, I am ill.

  I have taken a pill to kill

  The thin

  Papery feeling.

  Saboteur,

  Kamikaze man –

  The stain on your

  Gauze Ku Klux Klan

  Babushka

  Darkens and tarnishes and when

  The balled

  Pulp of your heart

  Confronts its small

  Mill of silence

  How you jump –

  Trepanned veteran,

  Dirty girl,

  Thumb stump.

  By Candlelight

  This is winter, this is night, small love –

  A sort of black horsehair,

  A rough, dumb country stuff

  Steeled with the sheen

  Of what green stars can make it to our gate.

  I hold you on my arm.

  It is very late.

  The dull bells tongue the hour.

  The mirror floats us at one candle power.

  This is the fluid in which we meet each other,

  This haloey radiance that seems to breathe

  And lets our shadows wither

  Only to blow

  Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.

  One match scratch makes you real.

  At first the candle will not bloom at all –

  It snuffs its bud

  To almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.

  I hold my breath until you creak to life,

  Balled hedgehog,

  Small and cross. The yellow knife

  Grows tall. You clutch your bars.

  My singing makes you roar.

  I rock you like a boat

  Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor,

  While the brass man

  Kneels, back bent, as best he can

  Hefting his white pillar with the light

  That keeps the sky at bay,

  The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight!

  He is yours, the little brassy Atlas –

  Poor heirloom, all you have,

  At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs,

  No child, no wife.

  Five balls! Five bright brass balls!

  To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.

  Ariel

  Stasis in darkness.

  Then the substanceless blue

  Pour of tor and distances.

  God’s lioness,

  How one we grow,

  Pivot of heels and knees! – The furrow

  Splits and passes, sister to

  The brown arc

  Of the neck I cannot catch,

  Nigger-eye

  Berries cast dark

  Hooks –

  Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

  Shadows.

  Something else

  Hauls me through air –

  Thighs, hair;

  Flakes from my heels.

  White

  Godiva, I unpeel –

  Dead hands, dead stringencies.

  And now I

  Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

  The child’s cry

  Melts in the wall.

  And I

  Am the arrow,

  The dew that flies

  Suicidal, at one with the drive

  Into the red

  Eye, the cauldron of morning.

  Poppies in October

  Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.

  Nor the woman in the ambulance

  Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –

  A gift, a love gift

  Utterly unasked for

  By a sky

  Palely and flamily

  Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes

  Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

  O my God, what am I

  That these late mouths should cry open

  In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

  Nick and the Candlestick

  I am a miner. The light burns blue.

  Waxy stalactites

  Drip and thicken, tears

  The earthen womb

  Exudes from its dead boredom.

  Black bat airs

  Wrap me, raggy shawls,

  Cold homicides.

  They weld to me like plums.

  Old cave of calcium

  Icicles, old echoer.

  Even the newts are white,

  Those holy Joes.

  And the fish, the fish –

  Christ! they are panes of ice,

  A vice of knives,

  A piranha

  Religion, drinking

  Its first communion out of my live toes.

  The candle

  Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

  Its yellows hearten.

  O love, how did you get here?

  O embryo

  Remembering, even in sleep,

  Your crossed position.

  The blood blooms clean

  In you, ruby.

  The pain

  You wake to is not yours.

  Love, love,

  I have hung our cave with roses,

  With soft rugs –

  The last of Victoriana.

  Let the stars

  Plummet to their dark address,

  Let the mercuric

  Atoms that cripple drip

  Into the terrible well,

  You are the one

  Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

  You are the baby in the barn.

  Letter in November

  Love, the world

  Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight

  Splits through the rat’s-tail

  Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.

  It is the Arctic,

  This little black

  Circle,
with its tawn silk grasses – babies’ hair.

  There is a green in the air,

  Soft, delectable.

  It cushions me lovingly.

  I am flushed and warm.

  I think I may be enormous,

  I am so stupidly happy,

  My wellingtons

  Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

  This is my property.

  Two times a day

  I pace it, sniffing

  The barbarous holly with its viridian

  Scallops, pure iron,

  And the wall of old corpses.

  I love them.

  I love them like history.

  The apples are golden,

  Imagine it –

  My seventy trees

  Holding their gold-ruddy balls

  In a thick gray death-soup,

  Their million

  Gold leaves metal and breathless.

  O love, O celibate.

  Nobody but me

  Walks the waist-high wet.

  The irreplaceable

  Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

  Death & Co.

  Two, of course there are two.

  It seems perfectly natural now –

  The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded

  And balled, like Blake’s,

  Who exhibits

  The birthmarks that are his trademark –

  The scald scar of water,

  The nude

  Verdigris of the condor.

  I am red meat. His beak

  Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

  He tells me how badly I photograph.

  He tells me how sweet