by Sylvia Plath
Will it show in the black detector?
Will it come out
Wavery, indelible, true
Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery,
The Moroccan hippopotamus?
They stare from a square, stiff frill.
They are for export,
One a fool, the other a fool.
A secret! An extra amber
Brandy finger
Roosting and cooing ‘You, you’
Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys.
A knife that can be taken out
To pare nails,
To lever the dirt.
‘It won’t hurt.’
An illegitimate baby——
That big blue head!
How it breathes in the bureau drawer.
‘Is that lingerie, pet?
‘It smells of salt cod, you had better
Stab a few cloves in an apple,
Make a sachet or
Do away with the bastard.
Do away with it altogether.’
‘No, no, it is happy there.’
‘But it wants to get out!
Look, look! It is wanting to crawl.’
My god, there goes the stopper!
The cars in the Place de la Concorde——
Watch out!
A stampede, a stampede——
Horns twirling, and jungle gutterals.
An exploded bottle of stout,
Slack foam in the lap.
You stumble out,
Dwarf baby,
The knife in your back.
‘I feel weak.’
The secret is out.
The Jailor
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.
The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position
With the same trees and headstones.
Is that all he can come up with,
The rattler of keys?
I have been drugged and raped.
Seven hours knocked out of my right mind
Into a black sack
Where I relax, foetus or cat,
Lever of his wet dreams.
Something is gone.
My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin
Drops me from a terrible altitude.
Carapace smashed,
I spread to the beaks of birds.
O little gimlets——
What holes this papery day is already full of!
He has been burning me with cigarettes,
Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.
I am myself. That is not enough.
The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.
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,
<
br /> 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 stringencies.
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 g
ives 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.
