Gigolo by Sylvia Plath
Pocket watch, I tick well. The streets are lizardly crevices Sheer-sided, with holes where to hide. It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries. Bright fish hooks, the smiles of women […]
Getting There by Sylvia Plath
How far is it? How far is it now? The gigantic gorilla interior Of the wheels move, they appall 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 was or other. I am dragging my body […]
Full Fathom Five by Sylvia Plath
Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide’s coming When seas wash cold, foam- Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves Crest and trough. Miles long Extend the radial sheaves Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins Knotted, caught, survives The old myth of orgins […]
Frog Autumn by Sylvia Plath
Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother. The insects are scant, skinny. In these palustral homes we only Croak and wither. Mornings dissipate in somnolence. The sun brightens tardily Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us. he fen sickens. Frost drops even the spider. Clearly The genius of plenitude Houses himself elsewhwere. Our folk thin Lamentably. ————— […]
Firesong by Sylvia Plath
Born green we were to this flawed garden, but in speckled thickets, warted as a toad, spitefully skulks our warden, fixing his snare which hauls down buck, cock, trout, till all most fair is tricked to faulter in split blood. Now our whole task’s to hack some angel-shape worth wearing from his crabbed midden where […]
Finisterre by Sylvia Plath
This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic, Cramped on nothing. Black Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it, Whitened by the faces of the drowned. Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks — Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars. […]
Fiesta Melons by Sylvia Plath
In Benidorm there are melons, Whole donkey-carts full Of innumerable melons, Ovals and balls, Bright green and thumpable Laced over with stripes Of turtle-dark green. Chooose an egg-shape, a world-shape, Bowl one homeward to taste In the whitehot noon : Cream-smooth honeydews, Pink-pulped whoppers, Bump-rinded cantaloupes With orange cores. Each wedge wears a studding Of […]
Fever 103° by Sylvia Plath
Pure? What does it mean? The tongues of hell Are dull, dull as the triple Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable Of licking clean The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin. The tinder cries. The indelible smell Of a snuffed candle! Love, love, the low smokes roll From me like […]
Female Author by Sylvia Plath
All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world: Favored (while suddenly the rains begin Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin. Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms Where polished higboys whisper creaking curses And hothouse roses shed immortal blooms. […]
Faun by Sylvia Plath
Haunched like a faun, he hooed From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost Until all owls in the twigged forest Flapped black to look and brood On the call this man made. No sound but a drunken coot Lurching home along river bank. Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank Of double star-eyes lit Boughs where those […]
Face Lift by Sylvia Plath
You bring me good news from the clinic, Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right. When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask. The nauseous vault Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons. Then mother swam up, holding a […]
Event by Sylvia Plath
How the elements solidify! — The moonlight, that chalk cliff In whose rift we lie Back to back. I hear an owl cry From its cold indigo. Intolerable vowels enter my heart. The child in the white crib revolves and sighs, Opens its mouth now, demanding. His little face is carved in pained, red wood. […]
Elm by Sylvia Plath
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 you madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and […]
Ella Mason And Her Eleven Cats by Sylvia Plath
Old Ella Mason keeps cats, eleven at last count, In her ramshackle house off Somerset Terrace; People make queries On seeing our neighbor’s cat-haunt, Saying: ‘Something’s addled in a woman who accommodates That many cats.’ Rum and red-faced as a water-melon, her voice Long gone to wheeze and seed, Ella Mason For no good reason […]
Edge by Sylvia Plath
The woman is perfected Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now […]
Eavesdropper by Sylvia Plath
Your brother will trim my hedges! They darken your house, Nosy grower, Mole on my shoulder, To be scratched absently, To bleed, if it comes to that. The stain of the tropics Still urinous on you, a sin. A kind of bush-stink. You may be local, But that yellow! Godawful! Your body one Long nicotine-finger […]
Doomsday by Sylvia Plath
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 […]
Dialogue En Route by Sylvia Plath
‘If only something would happen!’ sighed Eve, the elevator-girl ace, to Adam the arrogant matador as they shot past the forty-ninth floor in a rocketing vertical clockcase, fast as a fallible falcon. ‘I wish millionaire uncles and aunts would umbrella like liberal toadstools in a shower of Chanel, Dior gowns, filet mignon and walloping wines, […]
Dialogue Between Ghost And Priest by Sylvia Plath
In the rectory garden on his evening walk Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was In black November. 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 […]
Departure by Sylvia Plath
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 […]
Denouement Villanelle by Sylvia Plath
The telegram says you have gone away And left our bankrupt circus on its own; 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 woolly dogs have had their day They […]
Dark Wood, Dark Water by Sylvia Plath
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 […]
Dark House by Sylvia Plath
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. […]
Danse Macabre by Sylvia Plath
Down among strict roots and rocks, eclipsed beneath blind lid of land goes the grass-embroidered box. Arranged in sheets of ice, the fond skeleton still craves to have fever from the world behind. Hands reach back to relics of nippled moons, extinct and cold, frozen in designs of love. At twelve, each skull is aureoled […]
Cut by Sylvia Plath
What a thrill – My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of 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 […]
Crystal Gazer by Sylvia Plath
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: […]
Contusion by Sylvia Plath
Color floods to the spot, dull purple. The rest of the body is all washed-out, The color of pearl. In a pit of a rock The sea sucks obsessively, One hollow thw whole sea’s pivot. The size of a fly, The doom mark Crawls down the wall. The heart shuts, The sea slides back, The […]
Cinderella by Sylvia Plath
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 […]
Childless Woman by Sylvia Plath
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, […]
Child by Sylvia Plath
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. I want to fill it with color and ducks, The zoo of the new Whose name 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 […]
Channel Crossing by Sylvia Plath
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 […]
Candles by Sylvia Plath
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 […]
Bucolics by Sylvia Plath
Mayday: two came to field in such wise : `A daisied mead’, each said to each, So were they one; so sought they couch, Across barbed stile, through flocked brown cows. `No pitchforked farmer, please,’ she said; `May cockcrow guard us safe,’ said he; By blackthorn thicket, flower spray They pitched their coats, come to […]
Brasilia by Sylvia Plath
Will they occur, These people with torso of steel Winged elbows and eyeholes Awaiting masses Of cloud to give them expression, These super-people! – And my baby a nail Driven, driven in. He shrieks in his grease Bones nosing for distance. And I, nearly extinct, His three teeth cutting Themselves on my thumb – And […]
Blue Moles by Sylvia Plath
1 They’re out of the dark’s ragbag, these two Moles dead in the pebbled rut, Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart — Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed. One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough, Little victim unearthed by some large creature From his orbit under the elm root. The second carcass […]
Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath
(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; […]
Barren Woman by Sylvia Plath
Empty, I echo to the least footfall, Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas. In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself, Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies Exhale their pallor like scent. I imagine myself with a great public, Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos. […]
Aquatic Nocturne by Sylvia Plath
deep in liquid turquoise slivers of dilute light quiver in thin streaks of bright tinfoil on mobile jet: pale flounder waver by tilting silver: in the shallows agile minnows flicker gilt: grapeblue mussels dilate lithe and pliant valves: dull lunar globes of blubous jellyfish glow milkgreen: eels twirl in wily spirals on elusive tails: adroir […]
April Aubade by Sylvia Plath
Worship this world of watercolor mood in glass pagodas hung with veils of green where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood and sap ascends the steeple of the vein. A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals to waken dreamers in the milky dawn, while tulips bow like a college of cardinals before that papal paragon, the sun. […]
April 18 by Sylvia Plath
the slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull and if my stomach would contract because of some explicable phenomenon such as pregnancy or constipation I would not remember you or that because of sleep infrequent as a moon of greencheese that because of food nourishing as violet leaves that because […]