Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath (5 page)

Viciousness in the kitchen!

The potatoes hiss.

It is all Hollywood, windowless,

The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,

Coy paper strips for doors –

Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz.

And I, love, am a pathological liar,

And my child – look at her, face down on the floor,

Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear –

Why she is schizophrenic,

Her face red and white, a panic,

You have stuck her kittens outside your window

In a sort of cement well

Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.

You say you can’t stand her,

The bastard’s a girl.

You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio

Clear of voices and history, the staticky

Noise of the new.

You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!

You say I should drown my girl.

She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.

The baby smiles, fat snail,

From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.

You could eat him. He’s a boy.

You say your husband is just no good to you.

His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.

You have one baby, I have two.

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,

Me and you.

Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.

I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

The smog of cooking, the smog of hell

Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,

Our bones, our hair.

I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.

Once you were beautiful.

In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: ‘Through?

Gee baby, you are rare.’

You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.

The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.

I try to keep him in,

An old pole for the lightning,

The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.

He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,

Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.

The blue sparks spill,

Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

O jewel! O valuable!

That night the moon

Dragged its blood bag, sick

Animal

Up over the harbor lights.

And then grew normal,

Hard and apart and white.

The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.

We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,

Working it like dough, a mulatto body,

The silk grits.

A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

Now I am silent, hate

Up to my neck,

Thick, thick.

I do not speak.

I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,

I am packing the babies,

I am packing the sick cats.

O vase of acid,

It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.

He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate

That opens to the sea

Where it drives in, white and black,

Then spews it back.

Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.

You are so exhausted.

Your voice my ear-ring,

Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.

That is that. That is that.

Your peer from the door,

Sad hag. ‘Every woman’s a whore.

I can’t communicate.’

I see your cute décor

Close on you like the fist of a baby

Or an anemone, that sea

Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.

I am still raw.

I say I may be back.

You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.

What a thrill –

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,

The Indian’s axed your scalp.

Your turkey wattle

Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.

I step on it,

Clutching my bottle

Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.

Out of a gap

A million soldiers run,

Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?

O my

Homunculus, I am ill.

I have taken a pill to kill

The thin

Papery feeling.

Saboteur,

Kamikaze man –

The stain on your

Gauze Ku Klux Klan

Babushka

Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled

Pulp of your heart

Confronts its small

Mill of silence

How you jump –

Trepanned veteran,

Dirty girl,

Thumb stump.

This is winter, this is night, small love –

A sort of black horsehair,

A rough, dumb country stuff

Steeled with the sheen

Of what green stars can make it to our gate.

I hold you on my arm.

It is very late.

The dull bells tongue the hour.

The mirror floats us at one candle power.

This is the fluid in which we meet each other,

This haloey radiance that seems to breathe

And lets our shadows wither

Only to blow

Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.

One match scratch makes you real.

At first the candle will not bloom at all –

It snuffs its bud

To almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.

I hold my breath until you creak to life,

Balled hedgehog,

Small and cross. The yellow knife

Grows tall. You clutch your bars.

My singing makes you roar.

I rock you like a boat

Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor,

While the brass man

Kneels, back bent, as best he can

Hefting his white pillar with the light

That keeps the sky at bay,

The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight!

He is yours, the little brassy Atlas –

Poor heirloom, all you have,

At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs,

No child, no wife.

Five balls! Five bright brass balls!

To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees! – The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye

Berries cast dark

Hooks –

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air –

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel –

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.

Nor the woman in the ambulance

Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –

A gift, a love gift

Utterly unasked for

By a sky

Palely and flamily

Igniting its
carbon monoxides, by eyes

Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I

That these late mouths should cry open

In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

I am a miner. The light burns blue.

Waxy stalactites

Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.

Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,

Cold homicides.

They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium

Icicles, old echoer.

Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.

And the fish, the fish –

Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,

A piranha

Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.

The candle

Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.

O love, how did you get here?

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,

Your crossed position.

The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.

The pain

You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses,

With soft rugs –

The last of Victoriana.

Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric

Atoms that cripple drip

Into the terrible well,

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.

You are the baby in the barn.

Love, the world

Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight

Splits through the rat’s-tail

Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.

It is the Arctic,

This little black

Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies’ 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 gray 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.

Two, of course there are two.

It seems perfectly natural now –

The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded

And balled, like Blake’s,

Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark –

The scald scar of water,

The nude

Verdigris of the condor.

I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

He tells me how badly I photograph.

He tells me how sweet

The babies look in their hospital

Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck,

Then the flutings of their Ionian

Death-gowns,

Then two little feet.

He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that,

His hair long and plausive.

Bastard

Masturbating a glitter,

He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.

The frost makes a flower,

The dew makes a star,

The dead bell,

The dead bell.

Somebody’s done for.

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.

The fat

Sacrifices its opacity …

A window, holy gold.

The fire makes it precious,

The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,

Ousting the Jews.

Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out

Germany.

They do not die.

Gray birds obsess my heart,

Mouth-ash, ash of eye.

They settle. On the high

Precipice

That emptied one man into space

The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,

This holocaust I walk in,

O golden child the world will kill and eat.

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 this, they are Ledas.

O mother of leaves and sweetness

Who are these pietàs?

The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.