The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

We Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking Little or nothing.

Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with your own face on.

🖤

It took three days driving north to find a cloud The polite skies over Boston couldn’t possibly accommodate.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.

Lady, what am I doing With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood, Knee-deep in the cold and swamped by flowers?

I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded To pour myself out like a fluid Among bird feet and the stems of plants. I wasn’t fooled. I knew you at once.

Floating through the air in my soul-shift

I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls. How shall I tell anything at all To this infant still in a birth-drowse?

She lives quietly With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle, The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture She has one too many dimensions to enter. Grief and anger, exorcized, Leave her alone now.

Each nurse patched her soul to a wound and disappeared.

Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack.

Now silence after silence offers itself.

The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.

I can stay awake all night, if need be — Cold as an eel, without eyelids.

But what do you know about that My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall? Some things of this world are indigestible.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The moon lays a hand on my forehead, Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.

The dark still nurses its secret. On the green hill, under the thorn trees, They listen for the millennium, The knock of the small, new heart.

While far off, the axle of winter Grinds round, bearing down with the straw, The star, the wise gray men.

I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose Blooms out of a vase

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.

It is more natural to me, lying down. Then the sky and I are in open conversation, And I shall be useful when I lie down finally: Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments. Already he can feel daylight, his white disease, Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.

Widow. The dead syllable, with its shadow Of an echo, exposes the panel in the wall Behind which the secret passage lies—stale air, Fusty remembrances, the coiled-spring stair That opens at the top onto nothing at all. . . .

A second time, to have him near again— A paper image to lay against her heart The way she laid his letters, till they grew warm And seemed to give her warmth, like a live skin.

The trees of loneliness, the trees of mourning. They stand like shadows about the green landscape— Or even like black holes cut out of it.

Hand folding hand, and nothing in between. A bodiless soul could pass another soul In this clear air and never notice it — One soul pass through the other, frail as smoke And utterly ignorant of the way it took. That is the fear she has—the fear His soul may beat and be beating at her dull sense Like blue Mary’s angel, dovelike against a pane Blinded to all but the gray, spiritless room It looks in on, and must go on looking in on.

Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort. And they are wan, dulled by much travelling. The smaller and more timid never arrive at all But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust. They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

And your first gift is making stone out of everything. I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes, Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous, And dying to say something unanswerable.

If I pay the roots of the heather Too close attention, they will invite me To whiten my bones among them.

The black slots of their pupils take me in. It is like being mailed into space, A thin, silly message.

Of people the air only Remembers a few odd syllables. It rehearses them moaningly: Black stone, black stone. The sky leans on me, me, the one upright Among all horizontals.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton. When they free me, I am beaded with tears.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is three times life size, Her lips sweet with divinity. She does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying— She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.

The soul is another light. I have not seen it; it does not fly up. Tonight it has receded like a ship’s light.

The heart is a red-bell-bloom, in distress. I am so small In comparison to these organs!

My mirror is clouding over — A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all. The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart Under my feet in a neat parcel. I shall hardly know myself

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Separated from my house by a row of headstones. I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.