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.