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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Aerialist by Sylvia Plath
Aerialist Each night, this adroit young lady Lies among sheets Shredded fine as snowflakes Until dream takes her body From bed to strict tryouts In tightrope acrobatics. Nightly she balances Cat-clever on perilous wire In a gigantic hall, Footing her delicate dances To whipcrack and roar Which speak her maestro’s will. Gilded, coming correct Across […]