sylvia plath2017-10-24T00:35:44-07:00

Sylvia Plath

Burning the Letters

I made a fire; being tired
Of the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket
What did they know that I didn’t?
Grain by grain, they unrolled
Sands where a dream of clear water
Grinned like a getaway car.
I am not subtle
Love, love, and well, I was tired
Of cardboard cartons the color of cement or a dog pack
Holding in it’s hate
Dully, under a pack of men

April 19th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

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 in 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

April 19th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Candles

They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they’ll ignore

A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye
In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,
And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.
Daylight would be more judicious,

Giving everybody a

April 19th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Channel Crossing

On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul;
With each tilt, shock and shudder, our blunt ship
Cleaves forward into fury; dark as anger,
Waves wallop, assaulting the stubborn hull.
Flayed by spray, we take the challenge up,
Grip the rail, squint ahead, and wonder how much longer

Such force can last; but beyond, the neutral view
Shows, rank on rank, the hungry seas advancing.
Below, rocked havoc-sick, voyagers lie
Retching in bright orange basins; a refugee
Sprawls, hunched in black,

April 19th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate–
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.
-Sylvia Plath

April 19th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Childless Woman

The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.

My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself,

Myself the rose you acheive-
This body,
This ivory

Ungodly as a child’s shriek.
Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,
Loyal to my image,

Uttering nothing but blood-
Taste it, dark red!
And my forest

My funeral,
And this hill and this
Gleaming with the mouths of corpses.
-Sylvia Plath

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Child’s Park Stones

In sunless air, under pines
Green to the point of blackness, some
Founding father set these lobed, warped stones
To loom in the leaf-filtered gloom
Black as the charred knuckle-bones

Of a giant or extinct
Animal, come from another
Age, another planet surely. Flanked
By the orange and fuchsia bonfire
Of azaleas, sacrosanct

These stones guard a dark repose
And keep their shapes intact while sun
Alters shadows of rose and iris –
Long, short, long – in the lit garden
And kindles

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Cinderella

The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span

The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons’ shine,

And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Circus in Three Rings

In the circus tent of a hurricane
designed by a drunken god
my extravagant heart blows up again
in a rampage of champagne-colored rain
and the fragments whir like a weather vane
while the angels all applaud.

Daring as death and debonair
I invade my lion’s den;
a rose of jeopardy flames in my hair
yet I flourish my whip with a fatal flair
defending my perilous wounds with a chair
while the gnawings of love begin.

Mocking as Mephistopheles,
eclipsed by

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Contusion

Color floods to the spot, dull purple.
The rest of the body is all washed out,
The color of pearl.

In a pit of rock
The sea sucks obsessively,
One hollow the whole sea’s pivot.

The size of a fly,
The doom mark
Crawls down the wall.

The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted.
-Sylvia Plath

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Conversation Among the Ruins

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;
While you stand heroic in coat

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

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

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Crystal Gazer

Gerd sits spindle-shaped in her dark tent,
Lean face gone tawn with seasons ,
Skin worn down to the knucklebones
At her tough trade; without time’s taint
The burnished ball hangs fire in her hands, a lens
Fusing time’s three horizons.

Two enter to tap her sight, a green pair
Fresh leaved out in vows: ‘Come tell
How we shall do together,
Well or ill.’ Gerd slants a look at each: most dear,
Each to the other; fit fiber

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

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

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

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

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Dark House

This is a dark house, very big.
I made it myself,
Cell by cell from a quiet corner,
Chewing at the grey paper,
Oozing the glue drops,
Whistling, wiggling my ears,
Thinking of something else.

It has so many cellars,
Such eelish delvings!
U an round as an owl,
I see by my own light.
Any day I may litter puppies
Or mother a horse. My belly moves.
I must make more maps.

These marrowy tunnels!
Moley-handed, I eat my way.
All-mouth licks up the

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Dark Wood, Dark Water

This wood burns a dark
Incense. Pale moss drips
In elbow-scarves, beards

From the archaic
Bones of the great trees.
Blue mists move over

A lake thick with fish.
Snails scroll the border
Of the glazed water

With coils of ram’s-horn.
Out in the open
Down there the late year

Hammers her rare and
Various metals.
Old pewter roots twist

Up from the jet-backed
Mirror of water
And while the air’s clear

Hourglass sifts a
Drift of goldpieces
Bright waterlights are

Sliding their quoits one
After the other
Down boles of the

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

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

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Denouement

The telegram says you have gone away
And left our bankrupt circus on its town;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The maestro gives the singing birds their pay
And they buy tickets for the tropic zone;
The telegram says you have gone away.

The clever wolly dogs have had their day
They shoot the dice for one remaining bone;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The lion and the tigers turn to clay
And

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Departure

The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green;
Green, also, the grapes on the green vine
Shading the brickred porch tiles.
The money’s run out.

How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters.
Ungifted, ungrieved, our leavetaking.
The sun shines on unripe corn.
Cats play in the stalks.

Retrospect shall not often such penury-
Sun’s brass, the moon’s steely patinas,
The leaden slag of the world-
But always expose

The scraggy rock spit shielding the town’s blue bay
Against which

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest

In the rectory garden on his evening walk
Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was
In black Novemeber. After a sliding rain
Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk,
Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze
Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron.

Hauled sudden from solitude,
Hair prickling on his head,
Father Shawn perceived a ghost
Shaping itself from that mist.

‘How now,’ Father Shawn crisply addressed the

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Dirge for a Joker

Always in the middle of a kiss
Came the profane stimulus to cough;
Always from teh pulpit during service
Leaned the devil prompting you to laugh.

Behind mock-ceremony of your grief
Lurked the burlesque instinct of the ham;
You never altered your amused belief
That life was a mere monumental sham.

From the comic accident of birth
To the final grotesque joke of death
Your malady of sacrilegious mirth
Spread gay contagion with each clever breath.

Now you must play the

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Doom of Exiles

Now we, returning from the vaulted domes
Of our colossal sleep, come home to find
A tall metropolis of catacombs
Erected down the gangways of our mind.

Green alleys where we reveled have become
The infernal haunt of demon dangers;
Both seraph song and violins are dumb;
Each clock tick consecrates the death of strangers

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay-
And profane words scrawled black

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Doomsday

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Out painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

Electra on Azalea Path

The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering –
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back

April 18th, 2017|Sylvia Plath|0 Comments

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