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.

Charles Bukowski – Eat Your Heart Out

I've come by, she says, to tell you

that this is it. I'm not kidding, it's

over. this is it.

I sit on the couch watching her arrange

her long red hair before my bedroom

mirror.

she pulls her hair up and

piles it on top of her head-

she lets her eyes look at

my eyes-

then she drops her hair and

lets it fall down in front of her face.

we go to bed and I hold her

speechlessly from the back

my arm around her neck

I touch her wrists and hands

feel up to

her elbows

no further.

she gets up.

this is it, she says,

this will do. well,

I'm going.

I get up and walk her

to the door

just as she leaves

she says,

I want you to buy me

some high-heeled shoes

with tall thin spikes,

black high-heeled shoes.

no, I want them

red.

I watch her walk down the cement walk

under the trees

she walks all right and

as the poinsettias drip in the sun

I close the door.

Edgar Allan Poe – Sonnet - To Science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Sara Teasdale – Helen Of Troy

Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn

The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.

This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead

That sparkled so the day I saw it first,

And darkened slowly after. I am she

Who loves all beauty -- yet I wither it.

Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath --

Forever since my maidenhood to sow

Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep

Their bitter care above me even now.

It was the gods who led me to this lair,

That tho' the burning winds should make me weak,

They should not snatch the life from out my lips.

Olympus let the other women die;

They shall be quiet when the day is done

And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me

There is no rest. The gods are not so kind

To her made half immortal like themselves.

It is to you I owe the cruel gift,

Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire,

To you the beauty and to you the bale;

For never woman born of man and maid

Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I,

Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame

That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars

And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn.

Have I not made the world to weep enough?

Give death to me. Yet life is more than death;

How could I leave the sound of singing winds,

The strong sweet scent that breathes from off the sea,

Or shut my eyes forever to the spring?

I will not give the grave my hands to hold,

My shining hair to light oblivion.

Have those who wander through the ways of death,

The still wan fields Elysian, any love

To lift their breasts with longing, any lips

To thirst against the quiver of a kiss?

Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again,

To make the people love, who hate me now.

My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry

Against the fate that made men love my mouth

And left their spirits all too deaf to hear

The little songs that echoed through my soul.

I have no anger now. The dreams are done;

Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see

Aught but my body's fairness, till the end,

In all the islands set in all the seas,

And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,

Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,

Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,

For I shall be the sum of their desire,

The whole of beauty, never seen again.

And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake

With "Helen!" on their lips, and in their eyes

The vision of me. Always I shall be

Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light

That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold

Each one his dream that fashions me anew; --

With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars

Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow

Like burnished gold that still retains the fire.

Yea, I shall haunt until the dusk of time

The heavy eyelids filled with fleeting dreams.

I wait for one who comes with sword to slay --

The king I wronged who searches for me now;

And yet he shall not slay me. I shall stand

With lifted head and look within his eyes,

Baring my breast to him and to the sun.

He shall not have the power to stain with blood

That whiteness -- for the thirsty sword shall fall

And he shall cry and catch me in his arms,

Bearing me back to Sparta on his breast.

Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again!

Emily Dickinson – I never hear that one is dead (Poem 1325)

I never hear that one is dead
Without the chance of Life
Afresh annihilating me
That mightiest Belief,

Too mighty for the Daily mind
That tilling it’s abyss,
Had Madness, had it once or, Twice
The yawning Consciousness,

Beliefs are Bandaged, like the Tongue
When Terror were it told
In any Tone commensurate
Would strike us instant Dead -

I do not know the man so bold
He dare in lonely Place
That awful stranger - Consciousness
Deliberately face -