Sylvia Plath – Admonition

If you dissect a bird

To diagram the tongue

You'll cut the chord

Articulating song.

If you flay a beast

To marvel at the mane

You'll wreck the rest

From which the fur began.

If you pluck out the heart

To find what makes it move,

You'll halt the clock

That syncopates our love.

Sylvia Plath – All The Dead Dears

Rigged poker -stiff on her back

With a granite grin

This antique museum-cased lady

Lies, companioned by the gimcrack

Relics of a mouse and a shrew

That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

These three, unmasked now, bear

Dry witness

To the gross eating game

We'd wink at if we didn't hear

Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,

Our own grist down to its bony face.

How they grip us through think and thick,

These barnacle dead!

This lady here's no kin

Of mine, yet kin she is: she'll suck

Blood and whistle my narrow clean

To prove it. As I think now of her hand,

From the mercury-backed glass

Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother

Reach hag hands to haul me in,

And an image looms under the fishpond surface

Where the daft father went down

With orange duck-feet winnowing this hair ---

All the long gone darlings: They

Get back, though, soon,

Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,

Childbirths or a family barbecue:

Any touch, taste, tang's

Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,

And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair

Between tick

And tack of the clock, until we go,

Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver

Riddled with ghosts, to lie

Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.

Sylvia Plath – Aquatic Nocturne

deep in liquid

turquoise slivers

of dilute light

quiver in thin streaks

of bright tinfoil

on mobile jet:

pale flounder

waver by

tilting silver:

in the shallows

agile minnows

flicker gilt:

grapeblue mussels

dilate lithe and

pliant valves:

dull lunar globes

of blubous jellyfish

glow milkgreen:

eels twirl

in wily spirals

on elusive tails:

adroir lobsters

amble darkly olive

on shrewd claws:

down where sound

comes blunt and wan

like the bronze tone

of a sunken gong.

Sylvia Plath – Years

They enter as animals from the outer

Space of holly where spikes

Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,

But greenness, darkness so pure

They freeze and are.

O God, I am not like you

In your vacuous black,

Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.

Eternity bores me,

I never wanted it.

What I love is

The piston in motion . . .

My soul dies before it.

And the hooves of the horses,

There merciless churn.

And you, great Stasis . . .

What is so great in that!

Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?

It is a Christus,

The awful

God-bit in him

Dying to fly and be done with it?

The blood berries are themselves, they are very still.

The hooves will not have it,

In blue distance the pistons hiss.

Sylvia Plath – Who

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

Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth.

October's the month for storage.

Thie 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.

Sylvia Plath – Whiteness I Remember

Whiteness being what I remember

About Sam: whiteness and the great run

He gave me. I've gone nowhere since but

Going's been tame deviation. White,

Not of heraldic stallions: off-white

Of the stable horse whose history's

Humdrum, unexceptionable, his

Tried sobriety hiring him out

To novices and to the timid.

Yet the dapple toning his white down

To safe gray never grayed his temper.

I see him one-tracked, stubborn, white horse,

First horse under me, high as the roofs,

His near trot pitching my tense poise up,

Unsteadying the steady-rooted green

Of country hedgerows and cow pastures

To a giddy jog. Then for ill will

Or to try me he suddenly set

Green grass streaming, houses a river

Of pale fronts, straw thatchings, the hard road

An anvil, hooves four hammers to jolt

Me off into their space of beating,

Stirrups undone, and decorum. And

Wouldn't slow for the hauled reins, his name,

Or shouts of walkers: crossed traffic

Stalling curbside at his oncoming,

The world subdued to his run of it.

I hung on his neck. Resoluteness

Simplified me: a rider, riding

Hung out over the hazard, over hooves

Loud on earth's bedrock. Almost thrown, not

Thrown: fear, wisdom, at one: all colors

Spinning to still in his one whiteness.

Sylvia Plath – 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

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath – I Want, I Want

Open-mouthed, the baby god

Immense, bald, though baby-headed,

Cried out for the mother's dug.

The dry volcanoes cracked and split,

Sand abraded the milkless lip.

Cried then for the father's blood

Who set wasp, wolf and shark to work,

Engineered the gannet's beak.

Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch

Raised his men of skin and bone,

Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,

Thorns on the bloody rose-stem.

Sylvia Plath – Apprehensions

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself-

Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.

Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.

They are my medium.

The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A grey wall now, clawed and bloody.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Steps at my back spiral into a well.

There are no trees or birds in this world,

There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually:

A red fist, opening and closing,

Two grey, papery bags-

This is what i am made of, this, and a terror

Of being wheeled off under crosses and rain of pieties.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds

Swivel their heads and cry.

There is no talk of immorality amoun these!

Cold blanks approach us:

They move in a hurry.

Sylvia Plath – Insomniac

The night 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.

Sylvia Plath – A Sorcerer Bids Farewell To Seem

I'm through with this grand looking-glass hotel

where adjectives play croquet with flamingo nouns;

methinks I shall absent me for a while

from rhetoric of these rococo queens.

Item : chuck out royal rigmarole of props

and auction off each rare white-rabbit verb;

send my muse Alice packing with gaudy scraps

of mushroom simile and gryphon garb.

My native sleight-of-hand is wearing out :

mad hatter's hat yields no new metaphor,

and jabberwock will not translate his songs :

it's time to vanish like the cheshire cat

alone to that authentic island where

cabbages are cabbages; kings : kings.

Sylvia Plath – Barren Woman

Empty, I echo to the least footfall,

Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.

In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,

Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies

Exhale their pallor like scent.

I imagine myself with a great public,

Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.

Insread, the dead injure me attentions, and nothing can happen.

Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.

Sylvia Plath – A Birthday Present

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?

It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.

When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,

Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,

Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?

My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.

I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.

After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.

Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window

White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.

Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?

Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.

Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.

Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,

You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,

Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.

Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.

You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.

I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.

To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.

Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,

Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.

You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?

Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?

There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.

It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.

Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty

By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.

If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.

I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.

And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,

And the universe slide from my side.

Sylvia Plath – April Aubade

Worship this world of watercolor mood

in glass pagodas hung with veils of green

where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood

and sap ascends the steeple of the vein.

A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals

to waken dreamers in the milky dawn,

while tulips bow like a college of cardinals

before that papal paragon, the sun.

Christened in a spindrift of snowdrop stars,

where on pink-fluted feet the pigeons pass

and jonquils sprout like solomon's metaphors,

my love and I go garlanded with grass.

Again we are deluded and infer

that somehow we are younger than we were.