Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath

No novice

In those elaborate rituals

Which allay the malice

Of knotted table and crooked chair,

The new woman in the ward

Wears purple, steps carefully

Among her secret combinations of eggshells

And breakable humming birds,

Footing sallow as a mouse

Between the cabbage-roses

Which are slowly opening their furred petals

To devour and drag her down

Into the carpet’s design.

With bird-quick eye cocked askew

She can see in the nick of time

How perilous needles grain the floorboards

And outwit their brambled plan;

Now through her ambushed air,

Adazzle with bright shards

Of broken glass,

She edges with wary breath,

Fending off jag and tooth,

Until, turning sideways,

She lifts one webbed foot after the other

Into the still, sultry weather

Of the patients’ dining room.

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 stray 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

Exact as a snowflake.

But here – a burgeoning

Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits

Into vulgar motley –

A treason not to be borne. Let idiots

Reel giddy in bedlam spring:

She withdrew neatly.

And round her house she set

Such a barricade of barb and check

Against mutinous weather

As no mere insurgent man could hope to break

With curse, fist, threat

Or love, either.

Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag

In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin

Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man,

Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg:

Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig

He kings it, navel-knit to no groan,

But at the price of a pin-stitched skin

Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.

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 green

stem of my neighbor’s rose bush

o bent bow of thorns

the cat unsheathes its claws

the world turns

today

today I will not

disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners

or bunch my fist

in the wind’s sneer.

It was not a heart, beating,

That muted boom, that clangor

Far off, not blood in the ears

Drumming up any fever

To impose on the evening.

The noise came from outside:

A metal detonating

Native, evidently, to

These stilled suburbs: nobody

Startled at it, though the sound

Shook the ground with its pounding.

It took root at my coming

Till the thudding source, exposed,

Confounded inept guesswork:

Framed in windows of Main Street’s

Silver factory, immense

Hammers hoisted, wheels turning,

Stalled, let fall their vertical

Tonnage of metal and wood;

Stunned the marrow. Men in white

Undershirts circled, tending

Without stop those greased machines,

Tending, without stop, the blunt

Indefatigable fact.

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, shinbones,

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.

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled

On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,

Gas tanks, factory stacks – that landscape

Of imperfections his bowels were part of –

Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.

Sun struck the water like a damnation.

No pit of shadow to crawl into,

And his blood beating the old tattoo

I am, I am, I am. Children

Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift

Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.

A mongrel working his legs to a gallop

Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.

He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,

His body beached with the sea’s garbage,

A machine to breathe and beat forever.

Flies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole

Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.

The words in his book wormed off the pages.

Everything glittered like blank paper.

Everything shrank in the sun’s corrosive

Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.

He heard when he walked into the water

The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.