by Sylvia Plath
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, in a jacket of ashes,
The whole flat harbor anchored in
The round of his yellow eye-button.
A blimp swims up like a day-moon or tin
Cigar over his rink of fishes.
The prospect is dull as an old etching.
They are unloading three barrels of little crabs.
The pier pilings seem about to collapse
And with them that rickety edifice
Of warehouses, derricks, smokestacks and bridges
In the distance. All around us the water slips
And gossips in its loose vernacular,
Ferrying the smells of dead cod and tar.
Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes—
A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers.
Even our shadows are blue with cold.
We wanted to see the sun come up
And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,
Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost,
Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay
Encased in a glassy pellicle.
The sun will diminish it soon enough:
Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.
Full Fathom Five
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 origins
Unimaginable. You float near
As keeled ice-mountains
Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:
Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury
And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors
Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,
For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains
On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools
To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind
One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shin-bones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,
Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;
You defy other godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom’s border
Exiled to no good.
Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.
Blue Moles
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 makes a duel of the affair:
Blind twins bitten by bad nature.
The sky’s far dome is sane and clear.
Leaves, undoing their yellow caves
Between the road and the lake water,
Bare no sinister spaces. Already
The moles look neutral as the stones.
Their corkscrew noses, their white hands
Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.
Difficult to imagine how fury struck—
Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.
2
Nightly the battle-shouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
Light’s death to them: they shrivel in it.
They move through their mute rooms while I sleep,
Palming the earth aside, grubbers
After the fat children of root and rock.
By day, only the topsoil heaves.
Down there one is alone.
Outsize hands prepare a path,
They go before: opening the veins,
Delving for the appendages
Of beetles, sweetbreads, shards—to be eaten
Over and over. And still the heaven
Of final surfeit is just as far
From the door as ever. What happens between us
Happens in darkness, vanishes
Easy and often as each breath.
Strumpet Song
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 with blotch, dint, scar
Struck by each dour year.
Walks there not some such one man
As can spare breath
To patch with brand of love this rank grimace
Which out from black tarn, ditch and cup
Into my most chaste own eyes
Looks up.
Man in Black
Where the three magenta
Breakwaters take the shove
And suck of the grey sea
To the left, and the wave
Unfists against the dun
Barb-wired headland of
The Deer Island prison
With its trim piggeries,
Hen huts and cattle green
To the right, and March ice
Glazes the rock pools yet,
Snuff-colored sand cliffs rise
Over a great stone spit
Bared by each falling tide,
And you, across those white
Stones, strode out in your dead
Black coat, black shoes, and your
Black hair till there you stood,
Fixed vortex on the far
Tip, riveting stones, air,
All of it, together.
Snakecharmer
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 songs.
He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,
No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues
Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes,
Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom
Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes
Is visible. The snake-scales have become
Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast
Of tree and human. And he within this snakedom
Rules the writhings which make manifest
His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes
From his thin pipe. Out of this green
nest
As out of Eden’s navel twist the lines
Of snaky generations: let there be snakes!
And snakes there were, are, will be—till yawns
Consume this piper and he tires of music
And pipes the world back to the simple fabric
Of snake-warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes
To a melting of green waters, till no snake
Shows its head, and those green waters back to
Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.
Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.
The Hermit at Outermost House
Sky and sea, horizon-hinged
Tablets of blank blue, couldn’t,
Clapped shut, flatten this man out.
The great gods, Stone-Head, Claw-Foot,
Winded by much rock-bumping
And claw-threat, realized that.
For what, then, had they endured
Dourly the long hots and colds,
Those old despots, if he sat
Laugh-shaken on his doorsill,
Backbone unbendable as
Timbers of his upright hut?
Hard gods were there, nothing else.
Still he thumbed out something else.
Thumbed no stony, horny pot,
But a certain meaning green.
He withstood them, that hermit.
Rock-face, crab-claw verged on green.
Gulls mulled in the greenest light.
The Disquieting Muses
Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?
Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.
In the hurricane, when father’s twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
“Thor is angry: boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don’t care!”
But those ladies broke the panes.
When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
And the shadow stretched, the lights went out.
Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
And praised my arabesques and trills
Although each teacher found my touch
Oddly wooden in spite of scales
And the hours of practicing, my ear
Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired by you, dear mother,
I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Flowers and bluebirds that never were
Never, never, found anywhere.
But the little planet bobbed away
Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!
And I faced my traveling companions.
Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
Mother, mother. But no frown of mine
Will betray the company I keep.
Medallion
By the gate with star and moon
Worked into the peeled orange wood
The bronze snake lay in the sun
Inert as a shoelace; dead
But pliable still, his jaw
Unhinged and his grin crooked,
Tongue a rose-colored arrow.
Over my hand I hung him.
His little vermilion eye
Ignited with a glassed flame
As I turned him in the light;
When I split a rock one time
The garnet bits burned like that.
Dust dulled his back to ocher
The way sun ruins a trout.
Yet his belly kept its fire
Going under the chainmail,
The old jewels smoldering there
In each opaque belly-scale:
Sunset looked at through milk glass.
And I saw white maggots coil
Thin as pins in the dark bruise
Where his innards bulged as if
He were digesting a mouse.
Knifelike, he was chaste enough,
Pure death’s-metal. The yardman’s
Flung brick perfected his laugh.
The Companionable Ills
The nose-end that twitches, the old imperfections—
Tolerable now as moles on the face
Put up with until chagrin gives place
To a wry complaisance—
Dug in first as God’s spurs
To start the spirit out of the mud
It stabled in; long-used, became well-loved
Bedfellows of the spirit’s debauch, fond masters.
Moonrise
Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves.
I’ll go out and sit in white like they do,
Doing nothing. July’s juice rounds their nubs.
This park is fleshed with idiot petals.
White catalpa flowers tower, topple,
Cast a round white shadow in their dying.
A pigeon rudders down. Its fantail’s white.
Vocation enough: opening, shutting
White petals, white fantails, ten white fingers.
Enough for fingernails to make half-moons
Redden in white palms no labor reddens.
White bruises toward color, else collapses.
Berries redden. A body of whiteness
Rots, and smells of rot under its headstone
Though the body walk out in clean linen.
I smell that whiteness here, beneath the stones
Where small ants roll their eggs, where grubs fatten.
Death may whiten in sun or out of it.
Death whitens in the egg and out of it.
I can see no color for this whiteness.
White: it is a complexion of the mind.
I tire, imagining white Niagaras
Build up from a rock root, as fountains build
Against the weighty image of their fall.
Lucina, bony mother, laboring
Among the socketed white stars, your face
Of candor pares white flesh to the white bone,
Who drag our ancient father at the heel,
White-bearded, weary. The berries purple
And bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet.
Spinster
Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious April walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds’ irregular babel
And the leaves’ litter.
By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air,
His gait st
ray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.
How she longed for winter then!—
Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,
And heart’s frosty discipline