The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

The size of a fly, The doom mark Crawls down the wall. The heart shuts, The sea slides back, The mirrors are sheeted.

The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.

The dull drums of my pulses beat Against a silence wearing thin.

A whirlpool leers at me, Absorbent as a sponge; I cast off my identity And make the fatal plunge.

the slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull

in a few spaces of sky and treetops a future was lost yesterday as easily and irretrievably as a tennis ball at twilight

We ignore the coming doom of gold and we are glad in this bright metal season. Even the dead laugh among the goldenrod.

You never altered your amused belief That life was a mere monumental sham. From the comic accident of birth To the final grotesque joke of death

While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart.

the mute air merely thins and thins.

Sky won’t be drawn closer: absolute, it holds aloof, a shrouded parachute always the same distance from the falling man who never will abstain from asking, but inventive, hopes; in vain challenges the silent dome.

For most exquisite truths are artifice framed in disciplines of fire and ice which conceal incongruous elements like dirty socks and scraps of day-old bread and egg-stained plates; perhaps such sophistry can placate us.

we poise on perilous poles that freeze us in a cross of contradiction, racked between the fact of doubt, the faith of dream.

Again we are deluded and infer that somehow we are younger than we were.

He counted the guns of god a bother, laughed at the ambush of angels’ tongues, and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

If you can think of means to mend the vow we broke the minute that the world began tell me quick, darling, tell me now.

From here the moon seems smooth as angel-food, from here you can’t see spots upon the sun; never try to know more than you should.

For deadly secrets strike when understood and lucky stars all exit on the run: never try to knock on rotten wood, never try to know more than you should.

And when at last they blunder into bed World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.

Arranged in sheets of ice, the fond skeleton still craves to have fever from the world behind.

With kiss of cinders, ghosts descend, compelled to deadlock underground.

In the circus tent of a hurricane designed by a drunken god my extravagant heart blows up again in a rampage of champagne-colored rain and the fragments whir like a weather vane while the angels all applaud.

yet I flourish my whip with a fatal flair defending my perilous wounds with a chair while the gnawings of love begin.

What countermagic can undo the snare Which has stopped the season in its tracks And suspended all that might occur ?

Unravel antique samplers, unwind the clocks, till unruly children stream down the sky and old maids on impromptu petticoats fly with begonia and building blocks.

I sought my image in the scorching glass, for what fire could damage a witch’s face? So I stared in that furnace where beauties char but found radiant Venus reflected there.

Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on, A grain of sand is all we have.

Water will run by rule; the actual sun Will scrupulously rise and set; No little man lives in the exacting moon And that is that, is that, is that.

Turning the tables of this grave gourmet, the fiendish butler saunters in and serves for feast the sweetest meat of hell’s chef d’œuvres: his own pale bride upon a flaming tray: parsleyed with elegies, she lies in state waiting for his grace to consecrate.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks to knock them down with logic or with luck and contradict ourselves for fun; the waitress holds our coats and we put on the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun who insists his playmates run.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames in dubious doorways forget their monday names,

The moon leans down to look; the tilting fish in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish blessings right and left and cry hello, and then hello again in deaf churchyard ears until the starlit stiff graves all carol in reply.

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing the secret of their ecstasy’s in going; some day, moving, one will drop, and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals only to reopen as flesh congeals: cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells and heavens till the spirits squeak surrender:

today we start to pay the piper with each breath, yet love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart.