by Sylvia Plath
Poppies in October
for Helder and Suzette Macedo
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!
The Courage of Shutting-Up
The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!
The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking.
There are black discs behind it, the discs of outrage, And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it.
The discs revolve, they ask to be heard,
Loaded, as they are, with accounts of bastardies.
Bastardies, usages, desertions and doubleness, The needle journeying in its groove, Silver beast between two dark canyons, A great surgeon, now a tattooist,
Tattooing over and over the same blue grievances, The snakes, the babies, the tits
On mermaids and two-legged dreamgirls.
The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak.
He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it.
So the discs of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon.
Then there is that antique billhook, the tongue, Indefatigable, purple. Must it be cut out?
It has nine tails, it is dangerous.
And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going.
No, the tongue, too, has been put by Hung up in the library with the engravings of Rangoon And the fox heads, the otter heads, the heads of dead rabbits.
It is a marvellous object
The things it has pierced in its time!
But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?
Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms In which a torture goes on one can only watch.
The face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man.
Do not worry about the eyes
They may be white and shy, they are no stool pigeons, Their death rays folded like flags
Of a country no longer heard of,
An obstinate independency
Insolvent among the mountains.
Nick and the Candlestick
I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalacmites 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.
Berck-Plage
(1)
This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation!
Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.
Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly.
A sandy damper kills the vibrations; It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,
Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?
Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers
Who wall up their backs against him.
They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body.
The sea, that crystallized these,
Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.
(2)
This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,
The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest Who plumbs the well of his book,
The bent print bulging before him like scenery.
Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes,
Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar Of little crystals, titillating the light,
While a green pool opens its eye,
Sick with what it has swallowed----
Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers Two lovers unstick themselves.
O white sea-crockery,
What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat!
And the onlooker, trembling,
Drawn like a long material
Through a still virulence,
And a weed, hairy as privates.
(3)
On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things----
Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.
Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk
Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
I am not a smile.
These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.
This is the side of a man: his red ribs,
The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon: One mirrory eye----
A facet of knowledge.
On a striped mattress in one room
An old man is vanishing.
There is no help in his weeping wife.
Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable, And the tongue, sapphire of ash.
(4)
A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
How superior he is now.
It is like possessing a saint.
The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;
They are browning, like touched gardenias.
The bed is rolled from the wall.
This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit
Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak Rises so whitely, unbuffeted?
They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.
Now the washed sheets fly in the sun, The pillow cases are sweetening.
It is a blessing, it is a blessing: The long coffin of soap-colored oak,
The curious bearers and the raw date Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.
(5)
The grey sky lowers, the hills like a green sea Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,
The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife----
Blunt, practical boats
Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.
In the parlor of the stone house
One curtain is flickering from the open window, Flickering and pouring, a piti
ful candle.
This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.
How far he is now, his actions
Around him like livingroom furniture, like a decor.
As the pallors gather----
The pallors of hands and neighborly faces, The elate pallors of flying iris.
They are flying off into nothing: remember us.
The empty benches of memory look over stones,
Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.
It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.
(6)
The unnatural fatness of these lime leaves!----
Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.
The voice of the priest, in thin air, Meets the corpse at the gate,
Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell; A glitter of wheat and crude earth.
What is the name of that color?----
Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,
Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.
The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,
Necessary among the flowers,
Enfolds her face like fine linen,
Not to be spread again.
While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,
Passes cloud after cloud.
And the bride flowers expend a freshness,
And the soul is a bride
In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.
(7)
Behind the glass of this car
The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.
And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party, Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.
And the priest is a vessel,
A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,
Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman, A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips
Storming the hilltop.
Then, from the barred yard, the children
Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,
Their faces turning, wordless and slow,
Their eyes opening
On a wonderful thing----
Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood, And a naked mouth, red and awkward.
For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
There is no hope, it is given up.
Gulliver
Over your body the clouds go High, high and icily And a little flat, as if they
Floated on a glass that was invisible.
Unlike swans,
Having no reflections;
Unlike you,
With no strings attached.
All cool, all blue. Unlike you
You, there on your back, Eyes to the sky.
The spider-men have caught you,
Winding and twining their petty fetters, Their bribes
So many silks.
How they hate you.
They converse in the valley of your fingers, they are inchworms.
They would have you sleep in their cabinets,
This toe and that toe, a relic.
Step off!
Step off seven leagues, like those distances
That revolve in Crivelli, untouchable.
Let this eye be an eagle, The shadow of his lip, an abyss.
Getting There
How far is it?
How far is it now?
The gigantic gorilla interior Of the wheels move, they appal me The terrible brains
Of Krupp, black muzzles
Revolving, the sound
Punching out Absence! like cannon.
It is Russia I have to get across, it is some war or other.
I am dragging my body
Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.
Now is the time for bribery.
What do wheels eat, these wheels Fixed to their arcs like gods, The silver leash of the will Inexorable. And their pride!
All the gods know is destinations.
I am a letter in this slot I fly to a name, two eyes.
Will there be fire, will there be bread?
Here there is such mud.
It is a trainstop, the nurses Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery, Touching their wounded,
The men the blood still pumps forward, Legs, arms piled outside The tent of unending cries A hospital of dolls.
And the men, what is left of the men Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood Into the next mile,
The next hour
Dynasty of broken arrows!
How far is it?
There is mud on my feet, Thick, red and slipping. It is Adams side, This earth I rise from, and I in agony.
I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.
Steaming and breathing, its teeth Ready to roll, like a devils.
There is a minute at the end of it A minute, a dewdrop.
How far is it?
It is so small
The place I am getting to, why are there these obstacles The body of this woman,
Charred skirts and deathmask Mourned by religious figures, by garlanded children.
And now detonations
Thunder and guns.
The fires between us.
Is there no still place
Turning and turning in the middle air, Untouched and untouchable.
The train is dragging itself, it is screaming An animal
Insane for the destination, The bloodspot,
The face at the end of the flare.
I shall bury the wounded like pupas, I shall count and bury the dead.
Let their souls writhe in a dew, Incense in my track.
The carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces
Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.
Medusa
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs, Eyes rolled by white sticks, Ears cupping the seas incoherences, You house your unnerving headGod-ball, Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keels shadow, Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center, Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,
Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you,
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable, Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.
In any case, you are always there, Tremulous breath at the end of my line, Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful, Touching and sucking.
I didnt call you.
I didnt call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless You steamed to me over the sea, Fat and red, a placenta
Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath, Dead and moneyless,
Overexposed, like an X ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body, Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.
Purdah
Jade
Stone of the side, The agonized
Side of green Adam, I Smile, cross-legged, Enigmatical,
Shifting my clarities.
So valuable.
How the sun polishes this shoulder!
And should
The moon, my
Indefatigable cousin
Rise, with her cancerous pallors, Dragging trees Little bushy polyps,
Little nets,
My visibilities hide.
I gleam like a mirror.
At this facet the bridegroom arrives, Lord of the mirrors.
It is himself he guides
In among these silk Screens, these rustling appurtenances.
