Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath, Page 3

  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 the Generation of Vipers.

  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 me
nding.

  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

  for Ruth Fainlight

  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 fannin
g 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.