Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath (3 page)

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

Letting in the light, peephole after peephole –

A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus

He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness

Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie

Exposes embarrassments – the mizzling days

Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,

Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,

A garden of buggy roses that made him cry.

His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.

Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue –

How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!

Those sugary planets whose influence won for him

A life baptized in no-life for a while,

And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.

Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.

Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of gray mirrors.

Each gesture flees immediately down an alley

Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance

Drains like water out the hole at the far end.

He lives without privacy in a lidless room,

The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open

On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats

Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.

Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,

Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.

The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,

And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,

Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

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 solider color.

But they only dissolve and dissolve

Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

Pours by like destiny, bending

Everything in one direction.

I can feel it trying

To funnel my heat away.

If I pay the roots of the heather

Too close attention, they will invite me

To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,

Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

Gray as the weather.

The black slots of their pupils take me in.

It is like being mailed into space,

A thin, silly message.

They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,

All wig curls and yellow teeth

And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water

Limpid as the solitudes

That flee through my fingers.

Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;

Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.

Of people the air only

Remembers a few odd syllables.

It rehearses them moaningly:

Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

Among all horizontals.

The grass is beating its head distractedly.

It is too delicate

For a life in such company;

Darkness terrifies it
.

Now, in valleys narrow

And black as purses, the house lights

Gleam like small change.

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.

The sea cannons into their ear, but they don’t budge.

Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.

The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells

Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,

Almost too small for the mists to bother with.

The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia –

Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.

They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.

They go up without hope, like sighs.

I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.

When they free me, I am beaded with tears.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is striding toward the horizon,

Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.

A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot

A peasant woman in black

Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is three times life size,

Her lips sweet with divinity.

She does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying –

She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.

Gull-colored laces flap in the sea drafts

Beside the postcard stalls.

The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told:

‘These are the pretty trinkets the sea hides,

Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.

They do not come from the Bay of the Dead down there,

But from another place, tropical and blue,

We have never been to.

These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold.’

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –

Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.

At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness –

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,

Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful –

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.

The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.

That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.

We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,

In the two huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.

When the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and Yardley cosmetics,

I had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,

And the seven-year-old wouldn’t go out unless his jersey stripes

Matched the stripes of his socks.

O it was richness! – eleven rooms and a yacht

With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water

And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.

But I didn’t know how to cook, and babies depressed me.

Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red

With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.

When the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their cruises

They left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, ‘for protection’,

And a small Dalmatian.

In your house, the main house, you were better off.

You had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop

And a cook and a maid, and knew about the key to the bourbon.

I remember you playing ‘Ja Da’ in a pink piqué dress

On the gameroom piano, when the ‘big people’ were out,

And the maid smoked and shot pool under a green-shaded lamp.

The cook had one wall eye and couldn’t sleep, she was so nervous.

On trial, from Ireland, she burned batch after batch of cookies

Till she was fired.

O what has come over us, my sister!

On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get

We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups’ icebox

And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read

Aloud, crosslegged on the stern seat, from the
Generation
of
V
ipers
.

So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted –

A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,

Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing,

But ten years dead.

The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.

We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,

Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.

We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.

I see us floating there yet, inseparable – two cork dolls.

What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?

The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,

And from our opposite continents we wave and call.

Everything has happened.

The yew’s black fingers wag;

Cold clouds go over.

So the deaf and dumb

Signal the blind, and are ignored.

I like black statements.

The featurelessness of that cloud, now!

White as an eye all over!

The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.

He felt for his food.

His fingers had the noses of weasels.

I couldn’t stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:

Black yew, white cloud,

The horrific complications.

Finger-traps – a tumult of keys.

Empty and silly as plates,

So the blind smile.

I envy the big noises,

The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.

Deafness is something else.

Such a dark funnel, my father!

I see your voice

Black and leafy, as in my childhood,

A yew hedge of orders,

Gothic and barbarous, pure German.

Dead men cry from it.

I am guilty of nothing.

The yew my Christ, then.

Is it not as tortured?

And you, during the Great War

In the California delicatessen

Lopping the sausages!

They color my sleep,

Red, mottled, like cut necks.

There was a silence!

Great silence of another order.

I was seven, I knew nothing.

The world occurred.

You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

Now similar clouds

Are spreading their vacuous sheets.

Do you say nothing?

I am lame in the memory.

I remember a blue eye,

A briefcase of tangerines.

This was a man, then!

Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

I survive the while,

Arranging my morning.

These are my fingers, this my baby.

The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor.

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me.

Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!

I hear her great heart purr.

From her lips ampersands and percent signs

Exit like kisses.

It is Monday in her mind: morals

Launder and present themselves.

What am I to make of these contradictions?

I wear white cuffs, I bow.

Is this love then, this red material

Issuing from the steel needle that flies so blindingly?

It will make little dresses and coats,

It will cover a dynasty.

How her body opens and shuts –

A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges!

O heart, such disorganization!

The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.

ABC, her eyelids say.