SYLVIA PLATH

Selected Poems

chosenby
TED HUGHES

Publisher’s Note

The poems in this selection, like those inSylviaPlath:CollectedPoems, are arranged in chronological order of composition rather than of publication. For all of the poems apart from ‘Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper’ (1956) and ‘Resolve’ (1956), which have been published only inCollectedPoems, dates of composition and the collections in which they originally appeared are given below.

TheColossus (London, 1960; New York, 1962): ‘Spinster’ (1956), ‘Maudlin’ (1956), ‘Night Shift’ (1957), ‘Full Fathom Five’ (1958), ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’ (1959), ‘The Hermit at Outermost House’ (1959), ‘Medallion’ (1959), ‘The Manor Garden’ (1959), ‘The Stones’ (1959), ‘The Burnt-Out Spa’ (1959)

Ariel (London and New York, 1965): ‘You’re’ (1960), ‘Morning Song’ (1961), ‘Tulips’ (1961), ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961), ‘Little Fugue’ (1962), ‘Elm’ (1962), ‘Poppies in July’ (1962), ‘A Birthday Present’ (1962), ‘The Bee Meeting’ (1962), ‘Daddy’ (1962), ‘Cut’ (1962), ‘Ariel’ (1962), ‘Poppies in October’ (1962), ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ (1962), ‘Letter in November’ (1962), ‘Death & Co.’ (1962), ‘Sheep in Fog’ (1963), ‘The Munich Mannequins’ (1963), ‘Words’ (1963), ‘Edge’ (1963)

CrossingtheWater (London and New York, 1971): ‘Face Lift’ (1961), ‘Insomniac’ (1961), ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1961), ‘Finisterre’ (1961), ‘Mirror’ (1961), ‘The Babysitters’ (1961), ‘An Appearance’ (1962), ‘Crossing the Water’ (1962), ‘Among the Narcissi’ (1962)

WinterTrees (London, 1971; New York, 1972): ‘Lesbos’ (1962), ‘By Candlelight’ (1962), ‘Mary’s Song’ (1962), ‘Winter Trees’ (1962)

SELECTED POEMS

Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper

No novice

In those elaborate rituals

Which allay the malice

Of knotted table and crooked chair,

The new woman in the ward

Wears purple, steps carefully

Among her secret combinations of eggshells

And breakable humming birds,

Footing sallow as a mouse

Between the cabbage-roses

Which are slowly opening their furred petals

To devour and drag her down

Into the carpet’s design.

With bird-quick eye cocked askew

She can see in the nick of time

How perilous needles grain the floorboards

And outwit their brambled plan;

Now through her ambushed air,

Adazzle with bright shards

Of broken glass,

She edges with wary breath,

Fending off jag and tooth,

Until, turning sideways,

She lifts one webbed foot after the other

Into the still, sultry weather

Of the patients’ dining room.

Spinster

Now this particular girl

During a ceremonious April walk

With her latest suitor

Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck

By the birds’ irregular babel

And the leaves’ litter.

By this tumult afflicted, she

Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air,

His gait stray uneven

Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.

She judged petals in disarray,

The whole season, sloven.

How she longed for winter then! –

Scrupulously austere in its order

Of white and black

Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,

And heart’s frosty discipline

Exact as a snowflake.

But here – a burgeoning

Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits

Into vulgar motley –

A treason not to be borne. Let idiots

Reel giddy in bedlam spring:

She withdrew neatly.

And round her house she set

Such a barricade of barb and check

Against mutinous weather

As no mere insurgent man could hope to break

With curse, fist, threat

Or love, either.

Maudlin

Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag

In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin

Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man,

Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg:

Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig

He kings it, navel-knit to no groan,

But at the price of a pin-stitched skin

Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.

Resolve

Day of mist: day of tarnish

with hands

unserviceable, I wait

for the milk van

the one-eared cat

laps its gray paw

and the coal fire burns

outside, the little hedge leaves are

become quite yellow

a milk-film blurs

the empty bottles on the windowsill

no glory descends

two water drops poise

on the arched green

stem of my neighbor’s rose bush

o bent bow of thorns

the cat unsheathes its claws

the world turns

today

today I will not

disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners

or bunch my fist

in the wind’s sneer.

Night Shift

It was not a heart, beating,

That muted boom, that clangor

Far off, not blood in the ears

Drumming up any fever

To impose on the evening.

The noise came from outside:

A metal detonating

Native, evidently, to

These stilled suburbs: nobody

Startled at it, though the sound

Shook the ground with its pounding.

It took root at my coming

Till the thudding source, exposed,

Confounded inept guesswork:

Framed in windows of Main Street’s

Silver factory, immense

Hammers hoisted, wheels turning,

Stalled, let fall their vertical

Tonnage of metal and wood;

Stunned the marrow. Men in white

Undershirts circled, tending

Without stop those greased machines,

Tending, without stop, the blunt

Indefatigable fact.

Full Fathom Five

Old man, you surface seldom.

Then you come in with the tide’s coming

When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,

A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves

Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves

Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins

Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins

Unimaginable. You float near

As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear

Of, not fathomed. All obscurity

Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I

Cannot look much but your form suffers

Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors

Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.

The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me

To half-believe: your reappearance

Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines

Of your grained face shed time in runnels:

Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels

Of the ocean. Such sage humor and

Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-

Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.

Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle

To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,

Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once

Seen by any man who kept his head,

You defy questions;

You defy other godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom’s border

Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.

Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water.

Suicide off Egg Rock

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled

On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,

Gas tanks, factory stacks – that landscape

Of imperfections his bowels were part of –

Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.

Sun struck the water like a damnation.

No pit of shadow to crawl into,

And his blood beating the old tattoo

I am, I am, I am. Children

Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift

Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.

A mongrel working his legs to a gallop

Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.

He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,

His body beached with the sea’s garbage,

A machine to breathe and beat forever.

Flies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole

Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.

The words in his book wormed off the pages.

Everything glittered like blank paper.

Everything shrank in the sun’s corrosive

Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.

He heard when he walked into the water

The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.

The Hermit at Outermost House

Sky and sea, horizon-hinged

Tablets of blank blue, couldn’t,

Clapped shut, flatten this man out.

The great gods, Stone-Head, Claw-Foot,

Winded by much rock-bumping

And claw-threat, realized that.

For what, then, had they endured

Dourly the long hots and colds,

Those old despots, if he sat

Laugh-shaken on his doorsill,

Backbone unbendable as

Timbers of his upright hut?

Hard gods were there, nothing else.

Still he thumbed out something else.

Thumbed no stony, horny pot,

But a certain meaning green.

He withstood them, that hermit.

Rock-face, crab-claw verged on green.

Gulls mulled in the greenest light.

Medallion

By the gate with star and moon

Worked into the peeled orange wood

The bronze snake lay in the sun

Inert as a shoelace; dead

But pliable still, his jaw

Unhinged and his grin crooked,

Tongue a rose-colored arrow.

Over my hand I hung him.

His little vermilion eye

Ignited with a glassed flame

As I turned him in the light;

When I split a rock one time

The garnet bits burned like that.

Dust dulled his back to ochre

The way sun ruins a trout.

Yet his belly kept its fire

Going under the chainmail,

The old jewels smoldering there

In each opaque belly-scale:

Sunset looked at through milk glass.

And I saw white maggots coil

Thin as pins in the dark bruise

Where his innards bulged as if

He were digesting a mouse.

Knifelike, he was chaste enough,

Pure death’s-metal. The yardman’s

Flung brick perfected his laugh.

The Manor Garden

The fountains are dry and the roses over.

Incense of death. Your day approaches.

The pears fatten like little buddhas.

A blue mist is dragging the lake.

You move through the era of fishes,

The smug centuries of the pig –

Head, toe and finger

Come clear of the shadow. History

Nourishes these broken flutings,

These crowns of acanthus,

And the crow settles her garments.

You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,

Two suicides, the family wolves,

Hours of blankness. Some hard stars

Already yellow the heavens.

The spider on its own string

Crosses the lake. The worms

Quit their usual habitations.

The small birds converge, converge

With their gifts to a difficult borning.

The Stones

This is the city where men are mended.

I lie on a great anvil.

The flat blue sky-circle

Flew off like the hat of a doll

When I fell out of the light. I entered

The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

The mother of pestles diminished me.

I became a still pebble.

The stones of the belly were peaceable,

The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.

Only the mouth-hole piped out,

Importunate cricket

In a quarry of silences.

The people of the city heard it.

They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate,

The mouth-hole crying their locations.

Drunk as a foetus

I suck at the paps of darkness.

The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away.

The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry

Open one stone eye.

This is the after-hell: I see the light.

A wind unstoppers the chamber

Of the ear, old worrier.

Water mollifies the flint lip,

And daylight lays its sameness on the wall.

The grafters are cheerful,

Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers.

A current agitates the wires

Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures.

A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.

The storerooms are full of hearts.

This is the city of spare parts.

My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber.

Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.

On Fridays the little children come

To trade their hooks for hands.

Dead men leave eyes for others.

Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

The vase, reconstructed, houses

The elusive rose.

Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.

My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.

I shall be good as new.

The Burnt-Out Spa

An old beast ended in this place:

A monster of wood and rusty teeth.

Fire smelted his eyes to lumps

Of pale blue vitreous stuff, opaque

As resin drops oozed from pine bark.

The rafters and struts of his body wear

Their char of karakul still. I can’t tell

How long his carcass has foundered under

The rubbish of summers, the black-leaved falls.

Now little weeds insinuate

Soft suede tongues between his bones.

His armorplate, his toppled stones

Are an esplanade for crickets.

I pick and pry like a doctor or

Archaeologist among

Iron entrails, enamel bowls,

The coils and pipes that made him run.

The small dell eats what ate it once.

And yet the ichor of the spring

Proceeds clear as it ever did

From the broken throat, the marshy lip.

It flows off below the green and white

Balustrade of a sag-backed bridge.

Leaning over, I encounter one

Blue and improbable person

Framed in a basketwork of cat-tails.

O she is gracious and austere,

Seated beneath the toneless water!

It is not I, it is not I.

No animal spoils on her green doorstep.

And we shall never enter there

Where the durable ones keep house.

The stream that hustles us

Neither nourishes nor heals.

You’re

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

Gilled like a fish. A common-sense

Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.

Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,

Trawling your dark as owls do.

Mute as a turnip from the Fourth

Of July to All Fools’ Day,

O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.

Farther off than Australia.

Bent-backed atlas, our traveled prawn.

Snug as a bud and at home

Like a sprat in a pickle jug.

A creel of eels, all ripples.

Jumpy as a Mexican bean.

Right, like a well-done sum.

A clean slate, with your own face on.

Face Lift

You bring me good news from the clinic,

Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white

Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right.

When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist

Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault

Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.

Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.

O I was sick.

They’ve changed all that. Traveling

Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,

Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,

I roll to an anteroom where a kind man

Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious

Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two

Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard …

I don’t know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,

Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.

Even my best friend thinks I’m in the country.

Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.

When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I’m twenty,

Broody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa, my fingers

Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;

I hadn’t a cat yet.

Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady

I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror –

Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.

They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.

Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,

Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.

Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,

Pink and smooth as a baby.

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage –

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat

Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free –

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

They concentrate my attention, that was happy

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

Insomniac

The night sky 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 roses 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 gray 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.

Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,

Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.

Touched by a match, they might warm me,

And their fine lines singe

The air to orange

Before the distances they pin evaporate,

Weighting the pale sky with a solider color.

But they only dissolve and dissolve

Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

Pours by like destiny, bending

Everything in one direction.

I can feel it trying

To funnel my heat away.

If I pay the roots of the heather

Too close attention, they will invite me

To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,

Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

Gray as the weather.

The black slots of their pupils take me in.

It is like being mailed into space,

A thin, silly message.

They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,

All wig curls and yellow teeth

And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water

Limpid as the solitudes

That flee through my fingers.

Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;

Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.

Of people the air only

Remembers a few odd syllables.

It rehearses them moaningly:

Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

Among all horizontals.

The grass is beating its head distractedly.

It is too delicate

For a life in such company;

Darkness terrifies it.

Now, in valleys narrow

And black as purses, the house lights

Gleam like small change.

Finisterre

This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,

Cramped on nothing. Black

Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding

With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,

Whitened by the faces of the drowned.

Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks –

Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.

The sea cannons into their ear, but they don’t budge.

Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.

The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells

Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,

Almost too small for the mists to bother with.

The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia –

Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.

They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.

They go up without hope, like sighs.

I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.

When they free me, I am beaded with tears.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is striding toward the horizon,

Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.

A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot

A peasant woman in black

Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is three times life size,

Her lips sweet with divinity.

She does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying –

She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.

Gull-colored laces flap in the sea drafts

Beside the postcard stalls.

The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told:

‘These are the pretty trinkets the sea hides,

Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.

They do not come from the Bay of the Dead down there,

But from another place, tropical and blue,

We have never been to.

These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold.’

The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –

Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.

At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness –

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,

Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

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 a 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.

The Babysitters

It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.

The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.

That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.

We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,

In the two huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.

When the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and Yardley cosmetics,

I had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,

And the seven-year-old wouldn’t go out unless his jersey stripes

Matched the stripes of his socks.

O it was richness! – eleven rooms and a yacht

With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water

And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.

But I didn’t know how to cook, and babies depressed me.

Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red

With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.

When the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their cruises

They left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, ‘for protection’,

And a small Dalmatian.

In your house, the main house, you were better off.

You had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop

And a cook and a maid, and knew about the key to the bourbon.

I remember you playing ‘Ja Da’ in a pink piqué dress

On the gameroom piano, when the ‘big people’ were out,

And the maid smoked and shot pool under a green-shaded lamp.

The cook had one wall eye and couldn’t sleep, she was so nervous.

On trial, from Ireland, she burned batch after batch of cookies

Till she was fired.

O what has come over us, my sister!

On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get

We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups’ icebox

And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read

Aloud, crosslegged on the stern seat, from theGenerationofVipers.

So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted –

A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,

Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing,

But ten years dead.

The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.

We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,

Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.

We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.

I see us floating there yet, inseparable – two cork dolls.

What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?

The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,

And from our opposite continents we wave and call.

Everything has happened.

Little Fugue

The yew’s black fingers wag;

Cold clouds go over.

So the deaf and dumb

Signal the blind, and are ignored.

I like black statements.

The featurelessness of that cloud, now!

White as an eye all over!

The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.

He felt for his food.

His fingers had the noses of weasels.

I couldn’t stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:

Black yew, white cloud,

The horrific complications.

Finger-traps – a tumult of keys.

Empty and silly as plates,

So the blind smile.

I envy the big noises,

The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.

Deafness is something else.

Such a dark funnel, my father!

I see your voice

Black and leafy, as in my childhood,

A yew hedge of orders,

Gothic and barbarous, pure German.

Dead men cry from it.

I am guilty of nothing.

The yew my Christ, then.

Is it not as tortured?

And you, during the Great War

In the California delicatessen

Lopping the sausages!

They color my sleep,

Red, mottled, like cut necks.

There was a silence!

Great silence of another order.

I was seven, I knew nothing.

The world occurred.

You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

Now similar clouds

Are spreading their vacuous sheets.

Do you say nothing?

I am lame in the memory.

I remember a blue eye,

A briefcase of tangerines.

This was a man, then!

Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

I survive the while,

Arranging my morning.

These are my fingers, this my baby.

The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor.

An Appearance

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me.

Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!

I hear her great heart purr.

From her lips ampersands and percent signs

Exit like kisses.

It is Monday in her mind: morals

Launder and present themselves.

What am I to make of these contradictions?

I wear white cuffs, I bow.

Is this love then, this red material

Issuing from the steel needle that flies so blindingly?

It will make little dresses and coats,

It will cover a dynasty.

How her body opens and shuts –

A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges!

O heart, such disorganization!

The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.

ABC, her eyelids say.

Crossing the Water

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.

Where do the black trees go that drink here?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.

Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:

They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.

The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.

A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.

Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?

This is the silence of astounded souls.

Among the Narcissi

Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,

Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.

He is recuperating from something on the lung.

The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing:

It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy

Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.

There is a dignity to this; there is a formality –

The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.

They bow and stand: they suffer such attacks!

And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.

He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.

The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

Elm

forRuthFainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:

It is what you fear.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,

Its dissatisfactions?

Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.

How you lie and cry after it

Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,

Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,

Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?

This is rain now, this big hush.

And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

Scorched to the root

My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.

A wind of such violence

Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me

Cruelly, being barren.

Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go

Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.

How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?

Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.

What is this, this face

So murderous in its strangle of branches? –

Its snaky acids kiss.

It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults

That kill, that kill, that kill.

Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames,

Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.

I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you

Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.

Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.

Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! –

If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

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 just what I want.

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

‘Is this the one I am to 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 was 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 super 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 in purple,

Must you kill what you can?

There is this 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 spilt 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 too 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.

The Bee Meeting

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers –

The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.

In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,

And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?

They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?

Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,

Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.

Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.

They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?

Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?

Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,

Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.

Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,

Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,

Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.

Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?

No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat

And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.

They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.

Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?

The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?

It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,

This apparition in a green helmet,

Shining gloves and white suit.

Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me

With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.

I could not run without having to run forever.

The white hive is snug as a virgin,

Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

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 ofyou,

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 alwaysknew 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,

The 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

The babies look in their hospital

Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck,

Then the flutings of their Ionian

Death-gowns,

Then two little feet.

He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that,

His hair long and plausive.

Bastard

Masturbating a glitter,

He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.

The frost makes a flower,

The dew makes a star,

The dead bell,

The dead bell.

Somebody’s done for.

Mary’s Song

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.

The fat

Sacrifices its opacity …

A window, holy gold.

The fire makes it precious,

The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,

Ousting the Jews.

Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out

Germany.

They do not die.

Gray birds obsess my heart,

Mouth-ash, ash of eye.

They settle. On the high

Precipice

That emptied one man into space

The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,

This holocaust I walk in,

O golden child the world will kill and eat.

Winter Trees

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.

On their blotter of fog the trees

Seem a botanical drawing –

Memories growing, ring on ring,

A series of weddings.

Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,

Truer than women,

They seed so effortlessly!

Tasting the winds, that are footless,

Waist-deep in history –

Full of wings, otherworldliness.

In this, they are Ledas.

O mother of leaves and sweetness

Who are these pietàs?

The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.

Sheep in Fog

The hills step off into whiteness.

People or stars

Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.

O slow

Horse the color of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells –

All morning the

Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.

My bones hold a stillness, the far

Fields melt my heart.

They threaten

To let me through to a heaven

Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

The Munich Mannequins

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

Where the yew trees blow like hydras,

The tree of life and the tree of life

Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.

The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice.

It means: no more idols but me,

Me and you.

So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles

These mannequins lean tonight

In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,

Naked and bald in their furs,

Orange lollies on silver sticks,

Intolerable, without mind.

The snow drops its pieces of darkness,

Nobody’s about. In the hotels

Hands will be opening doors and setting

Down shoes for a polish of carbon

Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

O the domesticity of these windows,

The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,

The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz.

And the black phones on hooks

Glittering

Glittering and digesting

Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.

Words

Axes

After whose stroke the wood rings,

And the echoes!

Echoes traveling

Off from the center like horses.

The sap

Wells like tears, like the

Water striving

To re-establish its mirror

Over the rock

That drops and turns,

A white skull,

Eaten by weedy greens.

Years later I

Encounter them on the road –

Words dry and riderless,

The indefatigable hoof-taps.

While

From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars

Govern a life.

Edge

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,

Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:

We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.

She has folded

Them back into her body as petals

Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed

From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,

Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.

Her blacks crackle and drag.

About the Author

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime,The Colossus (1960), and a novel,The Bell Jar (1963). HerCollected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

About the Editor

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book,The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber and Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry,Tales fromOvid(1997) andBirthday Letters (1998). He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.

By the Same Author

poetry

ARIEL

THE COLOSSUS

CROSSING THE WATER

WINTER TREES

COLLECTED POEMS (edited by Ted Hughes)

fiction

THE BELL JAR

JOHNNY PANIC AND THE BIBLE OF DREAMS

forchildren

THE BED BOOK

(illustrated by Quentin Blake)

THE IT-DOESN’T-MATTER-SUIT

(illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner)

COLLECTED CHILDREN’S STORIES

biography

LETTERS HOME: CORRESPONDENCE 1950–1963

(edited by Aurelia Schober Plath)

THE JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH

(edited by Karen V. Kukil)

Copyright

First published in 1985
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved
© The Estate of Sylvia Plath, 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981, 1985

The right of Sylvia Plath to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–26224–3