The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

So fables go. And so all children sing Their bathtub battles deep, Hazardous and long,

Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you, And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Haloes lustrous as Sirius—

So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing, Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld, A world we lose by merely waking up.

Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.

Worse Even than your maddening Song, your silence.

Could they feel mud Pleasurable under claws As I could between bare toes? That question ended it—I Stood shut out, for once, for all, Puzzling the passage of their Absolutely alien Order as I might puzzle At the clear tail of Halley’s Comet coolly giving my Orbit the go-by, made known By a family name it Knew nothing of. So the crabs Went about their business, which Wasn’t fiddling, and I filled A big handkerchief with blue Mussels.

whiteness and the great run He gave me. I’ve gone nowhere since but Going’s been tame deviation.

I considered the poetry I rescued From blind air, from complete eclipse.

Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood Scared mothers to miscarry, Drove the dogs to cringe and whine, And turned the farmboy’s temper wolfish, The housewife’s, desultory.

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.

Cried out for the mother’s dug.

Cried then for the father’s blood

The queen in the mulberry arbor stared Stiff as a queen on a playing card. The king fingered his beard.

What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.

I would get from these dry-papped stones The milk your love instilled in them.

masked from men’s sight In an ebony air, on wings of witch cloth, Well-named, ill-famed a knavish fly-by-night,

All around us the water slips And gossips in its loose vernacular,

Cheated of the pyre and the rack, The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.

No pit of shadow to crawl into, And his blood beating the old tattoo I am, I am, I am.

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.” —Sylvia Plath, Bell Jar

O Oedipus. O Christ. You use me ill.

The stony actors poise and pause for breath. I brought my love to bear, and then you died.

It was my love that did us both to death.

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Kneeling down I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye Round, green, disconsolate as a tear. Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg Under the coronal of sugar roses The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

Tonight may the fish Be a harvest of silver in the nets, and the lamps Of our husbands and sons move sure among the low stars.

♥️

We are a dream they dream.

Sunset looked at through milk glass.

You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing, Two suicides, the family wolves, Hours of blankness.

What happens between us Happens in darkness, vanishes Easy and often as each breath.

in a ghost flower flat as paper and of a color vaporish as frost-breath,

Polly’s tree wears a valentine arc of tear-pearled bleeding hearts on its sleeve and, crowning it, one blue larkspur star.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

Dad

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull-plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.

In here, the grasses Unload their griefs on my shoes, The woods creak and ache, and the day forgets itself.

I am at home here among the dead heads. Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won’t notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.

I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet, Without dreams of any sort.

I said: I must remember this, being small. There were such enormous flowers,

O I am too big to go backward:

Time Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun Its endless glitter.

I housekeep in Time’s gut-end Among emmets and mollusks, Duchess of Nothing,

This is not death, it is something safer. The wingy myths won’t tug at us any more:

In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

If I am a little one, I can do no harm. If I don’t move about, I’ll knock nothing over. So I said, Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.

Drunk as a foetus I suck at the paps of darkness.

The stream that hustles us Neither nourishes nor heals.