All The Dead Dears by Sylvia Plath
Rigged poker -stiff on her back With a granite grin This antique museum-cased lady Lies, companioned by the gimcrack Relics of a mouse and a shrew That battened for a day on her ankle-bone. These three, unmasked now, bear Dry witness To the gross eating game We’d wink at if we didn’t hear Stars grinding, […]
Aftermath by Sylvia Plath
Compelled by calamity’s magnet They loiter and stare as if the house Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought Some scandal might any minute ooze From a smoke-choked closet into light; No deaths, no prodigious injuries Glut these hunters after an old meat, Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies. Mother Medea in a green smock […]
Admonition by Sylvia Plath
If you dissect a bird To diagram the tongue You’ll cut the chord Articulating song. If you flay a beast To marvel at the mane You’ll wreck the rest From which the fur began. If you pluck out the heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love. ————— […]
Above The Oxbow by Sylvia Plath
Here in this valley of discrete academies We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock, Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest. Still, they’re out best mustering of height: by Comparison with the sunnken silver-grizzled Back of the Connecticut, the river-level Flats of Hadley farms, they’re lofty enough Elevations […]
A Winter Ship by Sylvia Plath
At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of. Red and orange barges list and blister Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy, And apparently indestructible. The sea pulses under a skin of oil. A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole, Riding the tide of the wind, steady As wood and formal, […]
A Secret by Sylvia Plath
A secret! A secret! How superior. You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman, Holding up one palm- A difference between us? I have one eye, you have two. The secret is stamped on you, Faint, undulant watermark. Will it show in the black detector? Will it come out Wavery, indelible, true Through the African […]
Years by Sylvia Plath
They enter as animals from the outer Space of holly where spikes Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi, But greenness, darkness so pure They freeze and are. O God, I am not like you In your vacuous black, Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti. Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. […]
Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath
The horizons ring me like faggots, Tilted and disparate, and always unstable. Touched by a match, they might warm me, And their fine lines singe The air to orange Before the distances they pin evaporate, Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color. But they only dissolve and dissolve Like a series of promises, as […]
Words by Sylvia Plath
Axes After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes! Echoes traveling Off from the center like horses. The sap Wells like tears, like the Water striving To re-establish its mirror Over the rock That drops and turns, A white skull, Eaten by weedy greens. Years later I Encounter them on the road- Words dry […]
Witch Burning by Sylvia Plath
In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll’s body. Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat the devil out. In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed […]
Wintering by Sylvia Plath
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing. I have whirled the midwife’s extractor, I have my honey, Six jars of it, Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar, Wintering in a dark without window At the heart of the house Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam and the bottles of empty glitters […]
Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath
The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing. Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings. Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless, Waist-deep in history. Full of wings, otherworldliness. In […]
Widow by Sylvia Plath
Widow. The word consumes itself — Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire Levitating a numb minute in the updraft Over the scalding, red topography That will put her heart out like an only eye. Widow. The dead syllable, with its shadow Of an echo, exposes the panel in the wall Behind which the […]
Who by Sylvia Plath
The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in, Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth. October’s the month for storage. Thie shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach: Old tools, handles and rusty tusks. I am at home here among the dead heads. Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won’t notice. My heart is […]
Whitsun by Sylvia Plath
This is not what I meant: Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows, Bald eyes or petrified eggs, Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets, Lard-pale, sipping the thin Air like a medicine. The stopped horse on his chromium pole Stares through us; his hooves chew the breeze. Your shirt of crisp linen Bloats like […]
Whiteness I Remember by Sylvia Plath
Whiteness being what I remember About Sam: whiteness and the great run He gave me. I’ve gone nowhere since but Going’s been tame deviation. White, Not of heraldic stallions: off-white Of the stable horse whose history’s Humdrum, unexceptionable, his Tried sobriety hiring him out To novices and to the timid. Yet the dapple toning his […]
Verbal Calisthenics by Sylvia Plath
My love for you is more athletic than a verb, Agile as a star The tents of sun absorb. Treading circus tight ropes Of each syllable, The brazen jackanapes Would fracture if he fell. Acrobat of space The daring adjective Plunges for a phrase Describing arcs of love. Nimble as a noun, He catabpults in […]
Vanity Fair by Sylvia Plath
Through frost-thick weather This witch sidles, fingers crooked, as if Caught in a hazardous medium that might Merely by its continuing Attach her to heaven. At eye’s envious corner Crow’s-feet copy veining on a stained leaf; Cold squint steals sky’s color; while bruit Of bells calls holy ones, her tongue Backtalks at the raven Claeving […]
Tulips by Sylvia Plath
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my […]
Touch-And-Go by Sylvia Plath
Sing praise for statuary: For those anchored attitudes And staunch stone eyes that stare Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot At some steadfast mark Beyond the inconstant green Gallop and flick of light In this precarious park Where vivid children twirl Like colored tops through time Nor stop to understand How all their play is touch-and-go: […]
Totem by Sylvia Plath
The engine is killing the track, the track is silver, It stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless. Its running is useless. At nightfall there is the beauty of drowned fields, Dawn gilds the farmers like pigs, Swaying slightly in their thick suits, White towers of Smithfield ahead, Fat haunches and blood on […]
Three Women by Sylvia Plath
A Poem for Three Voices Setting: A Maternity Ward and round about FIRST VOICE: I am slow as the world. I am very patient, Turning through my time, the suns and stars Regarding me with attention. The moon’s concern is more personal: She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse. Is she sorry for what […]
Thalidomide by Sylvia Plath
O half moon– Half-brain, luminosity– Negro, masked like a white, Your dark Amputations crawl and appall– Spidery, unsafe. What glove What leatheriness Has protected Me from that shadow– The indelible buds. Knuckles at shoulder-blades, the Faces that Shove into being, dragging The lopped Blood-caul of absences. All night I carpenter A space for the thing […]
Terminal by Sylvia Plath
Riding home from credulous blue domes, the dreamer reins his waking appetite in panic at the crop of catacombs sprung up like plague of toadstools overnight: refectories where he reveled have become the holstery of worms, rapacious blades who weave within the skeleton’s white womb a caviare decay of rich brocades. Turning the tables of […]
Strumpet Song by Sylvia Plath
With white frost gone And all green dreams not worth much, After a lean day’s work Time comes round for that foul slut: Mere bruit of her takes our street Until every man, Red, pale or dark, Veers to her slouch. Mark, I cry, that mouth Made to do violence on, That seamed face Askew […]
Street Song by Sylvia Plath
By a mad miracle I go intact Among the common rout Thronging sidewalk, street, And bickering shops; Nobody blinks a lid, gapes, Or cries that this raw flesh Reeks of the butcher’s cleaver, Its heart and guts hung hooked And bloodied as a cow’s split frame Parceled out by white-jacketed assassins. Oh no, for I […]
Stopped Dead by Sylvia Plath
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 […]
Stings by Sylvia Plath
Bare-handed, I hand the combs. The man in white smiles, bare-handed, Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet, The throats of our wrists brave lilies. He and I Have a thousand clean cells between us, Eight combs of yellow cups, And the hive itself a teacup, White with pink flowers on it, With excessive love I […]
Stillborn by Sylvia Plath
These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.They grew their toes and fingers well enough,Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.If they missed out on walking about like peopleIt wasn’t for any lack of mother-love. O I cannot explain what happened to them!They are proper in shape and number and every part.They sit so nicely […]
Spinster by Sylvia Plath
Now this particular girl During a ceremonious april walk With her latest suitor Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck By the bird’s irregular babel And the leaves’ litter. By this tumult afflicted, she Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air, His gait stray uneven Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower; She judged […]
Spider by Sylvia Plath
Anansi, black busybody of the folktales, You scuttle out on impulse Blunt in self-interest As a sledge hammer, as a man’s bunched fist, Yet of devils the cleverest To get your carousals told: You spun the cosmic web: you squint from center field. Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin, Notable robber baron, Behind […]
Sow by Sylvia Plath
God knows how our neighbor managed to breed His great sow: Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid In the same way He kept the sow-impounded from public stare, Prize ribbon and pig show. But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour Through his lantern-lit Maze of barns to the lintel of […]
Southern Sunrise by Sylvia Plath
Color of lemon, mango, peach, These storybook villas Still dream behind Shutters, thier balconies Fine as hand- Made lace, or a leaf-and-flower pen-sketch. Tilting with the winds, On arrowy stems, Pineapple-barked, A green crescent of palms Sends up its forked Firework of fronds. A quartz-clear dawn Inch by bright inch Gilds all our Avenue, And […]
Snakecharmer by Sylvia Plath
As the gods began one world, and man another, So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere With moon-eye, mouth-pipe, He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water. Pipes water green until green waters waver With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings. And as his notes twine green, the green river Shapes its images around his sons. He […]
Sculptor by Sylvia Plath
To his house the bodiless Come to barter endlessly Vision, wisdom, for bodies Palpable as his, and weighty. Hands moving move priestlier Than priest’s hands, invoke no vain Images of light and air But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone. Obdurate, in dense-grained wood, A bald angel blocks and shapes The flimsy light; arms folded […]
Rhyme by Sylvia Plath
I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gut’s Honeycombed with golden eggs, Yet won’t lay one. She, addled in her goose-wit, struts The barnyard like those taloned hags Who ogle men And crimp their wrinkles in a grin, Jangling their great money bags. While I eat grits She fattens on the finest grain. Now, as I […]
Resolve by Sylvia Plath
Day of mist: day of tarnish with hands unserviceable, I wait for the milk van the one-eared cat laps its gray paw and the coal fire burns outside, the little hedge leaves are become quite yellow a milk-film blurs the empty bottles on the windowsill no glory descends two water drops poise on the arched […]
Recantation by Sylvia Plath
‘Tea leaves I’ve given up, And that crooked line On the queen’s palm Is no more my concern. On my black pilgrimage This moon-pocked crystal ball Will break before it help; Rather than croak out What’s to come, My darling ravens are flown. ‘Forswear those freezing tricks of sight And all else I’ve taught Against […]
Pursuit by Sylvia Plath
Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit. RACINE There is a panther stalks me down: One day I’ll have my death of him; His greed has set the woods aflame, He prowls more lordly than the sun. Most soft, most suavely glides that step, Advancing always at my back; From gaunt hemlock, rooks […]
Purdah by Sylvia Plath
Jade – Stone of the side, The antagonized 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. […]