by Sylvia Plath
I breathe, and the mouth
Veil stirs its curtain.
My eye
Veil is
A concatenation of rainbows.
I am his.
Even in his
Absence, I
Revolve in my Sheath of impossibles,
Priceless and quiet Among these parakeets, macaws.
O chatterers
Attendants of the eyelash!
I shall unloose One feather, like the peacock.
Attendants of the lip!
I shall unloose One note
Shattering
The chandelier Of air that all day plies
Its crystals, A million ignorants.
Attendants!
Attendants!
And at his next step I shall unloose
I shall unloose From the small jeweled Doll he guards like a heart
The lioness,
The shriek in the bath, The cloak of holes.
The Moon and the Yew Tree
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.
Fumey, 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 blacknessblackness and silence.
A Birthday Present
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is just what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking
'Is this the one I am to appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'
But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it was bones, or a pearl button.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all, I am alive only by accident.
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!
It must be a tusk there, a ghost-column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.
Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.
Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,
The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.
I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified
The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,
A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.
I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,
No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton----
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine----
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece in purple,
Must you kill what you can?
There is this one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold, dead center
Where spilt lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.
Letter in November
Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight Splits through the rats-tail Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,
This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grassesbabies hair.
There is a green in the air, Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.
I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing The barbarous holly with its viridian Scallops, pure iron,
And the wall of old corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden, Imagine it
My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls In a thick grey death-soup, Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.
O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist-high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.
Amnesiac
No use, no use, now, begging Recognize.
There is nothing to do with such a beautiful blank but smooth it.
Name, house, car keys,
The little toy wife
Erased, sigh, sigh.
Four babies and a cocker.
Nurses the size of worms and a minute doctor Tuck him in.
Old happenings
Peel from his skin.
Down the drain with all of it!
Hugging his pillow
Like the red-headed sister he never dared to touch, He dreams of
a new one Barren, the lot are barren.
And of another color.
How theyll travel, travel, travel, scenery Sparking off their brother-sister rears,
A comet tail.
And money the sperm fluid of it all.
One nurse brings in
A green drink, one a blue.
They rise on either side of him like stars.
The two drinks flame and foam.
O sister, mother, wife, Sweet Lethe is my life.
I am never, never, never coming home!
The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes, Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous, And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich.
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, o You
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do
But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, Im finally through.
The black telephones off at the root, The voices just cant worm through.
If Ive killed one man, Ive killed two The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
Theres a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through.
You're
Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools' Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
Fever 103deg
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus 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 Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe Choking the aged and the meek, The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib, The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern----
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up, I think I may rise----
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim, By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him
Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)----
To Paradise.
The Bee Meeting
Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers----
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection, And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.
I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock, Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed sil
k, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.
Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors, Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.
Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield,
Strips of tinfoil winking like people,