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.