The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye;

what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?

One day I’ll have my death of him;

We take the plunge; under water our limbs waver, faintly green, shuddering away from the genuine color of skin; can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in?

each day demands we create our whole world over, disguising the constant horror in a coat of many-colored fictions;

we freeze And marvel at the smashing nonchalance Of nature:

no debt Survives arrival; we walk the plank with strangers.