Ariel

by Sylvia Plath

  My ribs show. What have I eaten?

  Lies and smiles.

  Surely the sky is not that color, Surely the grass should be rippling.

  All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks, I dream of someone else entirely.

  And he, for this subversion Hurts me, he

  With his armory of fakery,

  His high, cold masks of amnesia.

  How did I get here?

  Indeterminate criminal,

  I die with variety----

  Hung, starved, burned, hooked.

  I imagine him

  Impotent as distant thunder, In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.

  I wish him dead or away.

  That, it seems, is the impossibility.

  That being free. What would the dark Do without fevers to eat?

  What would the light

  Do without eyes to knife, what would he Do, do, do without me.

  Cut

  for Susan ONeill 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 Indians 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.

  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 hiss.

  It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

  The Night Dances

  A smile fell in the grass.

  Irretrievable!

  And how will your night dances Lose themselves. In mathematics?

  Such pure leaps and spirals----

  Surely they travel

  The world forever, I shall not entirely Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

  Of your small breath, the drenched grass Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

  Their flesh bears no relation.

  Cold folds of ego, the calla,

  And the tiger, embellishing itself----

  Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

  The comets

  Have such a space to cross,

  Such coldness, forgetfulness.

  So your gestures flake off----

  Warm and human, then their pink light Bleeding and peeling

  Through the black amnesias of heaven.

  Why am I given

  These lamps, these planets Falling like blessings, like flakes

  Six-sided, white

  On my eyes, my lips, my hair

  Touching and melting.

  Nowhere.

  The Detective

  What was she doing when it blew in

  Over the seven hills, the red furrow, the blue mountain?

  Was she arranging cups? It is important.

  Was she at the window, listening?

  In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.

  That is the valley of death, though the cows thrive.

  In her garden the lies were shaking out their moist silks And the eyes of the killer moving sluglike and sidelong, Unable to face the fingers, those egotists.

  The fingers were tamping a woman into a wall,

  A body into a pipe, and the smoke rising.

  This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen, These are the deceits, tacked up like family photographs, And this is a man, look at his smile, The death weapon? No-one is dead.

  There is no body in the house at all.

  There is the smell of polish, there are plush carpets.

  There is the sunlight, playing its blades, Bored hoodlum in a red room

  Where the wireless talks to itself like an elderly relative.

  Did it come like an arrow, did it come like a knife?

  Which of the poisons is it?

  Which of the nerve-curlers, the convulsors? Did it electrify?

  This is a case without a body.

  The body does not come into it at all.

  It is a case of vaporization.

  The mouth first, its absence reported In the second year. It had been insatiable And in punishment was hung out like brown fruit To wrinkle and dry.

  The breasts next.

  These were harder, two white stones.

  The milk came yellow, then blue and sweet as water.

  There was no absence of lips, there were two children, But their bones showed, and the moon smiled.

  Then the dry wood, the gates,

  The brown motherly furrows, the whole estate.

  We walk on air, Watson.

  There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus.

  There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.

  Ariel

  Stasis in darkness.

  Then the substanceless blue Pour of tor and distances.

  Gods 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 str
ingencies.

  And now I

  Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

  The childs 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.

  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 Blakes, 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.

  Somebodys done for.

  Magi

  The abstracts hover like dull angels: Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals.

  Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry, Snow, chalk or suchlike. Theyre

  The real thing, all right: the Good, the True

  Salutary and pure as boiled water,

  Loveless as the multiplication table.

  While the child smiles into thin air.

  Six months in the world, and she is able To rock on all fours like a padded hammock.

  For her, the heavy notion of Evil

  Attending her cot is less than a belly ache, And Love the mother of milk, no theory.

  They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.

  They want the crib of some lamp-headed Plato.

  Let them astound his heart with their merit.

  What girl ever flourished in such company?

  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 widows frizz.

  And I, love, am a pathological liar, And my childlook at her, face down on the floor, Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear Why she is a 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 cant hear.

  You say you cant stand her, The bastards 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.

  Shell cut her throat at ten if shes mad at two.

  The baby smiles, fat snail, From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.

  You could eat him. Hes 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 theres a stink of fat and baby crap.

  Im 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, 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. They 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.

  You peer from the door,

  Sad hag. Every womans a whore.

  I cant communicate.

  I see your cute dcor

  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 shant meet.

  The Other

  You come in late, wiping your lips.

  What did I leave untouched on the doorstep

  White Nike,

  Streaming between my walls?

  Smilingly, blue lightning Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.

  The police love you, you confess everything.

  Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic,

  Is my life so intriguing?

  Is it for this you widen your eye-rings?

  Is it for this the air motes depart?

  They are not air motes, they are corpuscles.

  Open your handbag. What is that bad smell?

  It is your knitting, busily

  Hooking itself to itself, It is your sticky candies.

  I have your head on my wall.

  Navel cords, blue-red and lucent,

  Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride.

  O moon-glow, o sick one,

  The stolen horses, the fornications Circle a womb of marble.

  Where are you going

  That you suck breath like mileage?

  Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream.

  Cold glass, how you insert yourself

  Between myself and myself.

  I scratch like a cat.

  The blood that runs is dark fruit An effect, a cosmetic.

  You smile.

  No, it is not fatal.

  Stopped Dead

  A squeal of brakes.

  Or is it a birth cry?

  And here we are, hung out over the dead drop Uncle, pants factory Fatso, millionaire.

  And you out cold beside me in your chair.

  The wheels, two rubber grubs, bite their sweet tails.

  Is that Spain down there?

  Red and yellow, two passionate hot metals Writhing and sighing, what sort of a scenery is it?

&
nbsp; It isn't England, it isn't France, it isn't Ireland.

  It's violent. We're here on a visit, With a goddam baby screaming off somewhere.

  There's always a bloody baby in the air.

  I'd call it a sunset, but

  Whoever heard a sunset yowl like that?

  You are sunk in your seven chins, still as a ham.

  Who do you think I am,

  Uncle, uncle?

  Sad Hamlet, with a knife?

  Where do you stash your life?

  Is it a penny, a pearl----

  Your soul, your soul?

  I'll carry it off like a rich pretty girl, Simply open the door and step out of the car And live in Gibraltar on air, on air.