Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Fingering a leaflet of music, over him, Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands Of the death’s-head shadowing their song. These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.

103 Electra on Azalea Path The day you died I went into the dirt, Into the lightless hibernaculum Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard. It was good for twenty years, that wintering— As if you had never existed, as if I came God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly: Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity. I had nothing to do with guilt or anything When I wormed back under my mother’s heart. Small as a doll in my dress of innocence I lay dreaming your epic, image by image. Nobody died or withered on that stage. Everything took place in a durable whiteness. The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill. I found your name, I found your bones and all Enlisted in a cramped necropolis, Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence. In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower Breaks the soil. This is Azalea Path. A field of burdock opens to the south. Six feet of yellow gravel cover you. The artificial red sage does not stir In the basket of plastic evergreens they put At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot, Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye: The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red. Another kind of redness bothers me: The day your slack sail drank my sister’s breath The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth My mother unrolled at your last homecoming. I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy. The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry A sco...

124 Stillborn These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis. They grew their toes and fingers well enough, Their little foreheads bulged with concentration. If they missed out on walking about like people It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love. O I cannot understand what happened to them! They are proper in shape and number and every part. They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid! They smile and smile and smile and smile at me. And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start. They are not pigs, they are not even fish, Though they have a piggy and a fishy air— It would be better if they were alive, and that’s what they were. But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction, And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.

Friends, friends. They stink of armpits And the involved maladies of autumn, Musky as a lovebed the morning after. My nostrils prickle with nostalgia. Henna hags: cloth of your cloth. They toe old water thick as fog.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I’m alive now, then I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it, Staying put according to habit.

And we picnic in the death-stench of a hawthorn. The waves pulse and pulse like hearts. Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Seasick and fever-dry.

I can stay awake all night, if need be— Cold as an eel, without eyelids. Like a dead lake the dark envelops me, Blueblack, a spectacular plum fruit. No airbubbles start from my heart, I am lungless And ugly, my belly a silk stocking Where the heads and tails of my sisters decompose. Look, they are melting like coins in the powerful juices—

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.

Death is the dress she wears, her hat and collar. The moth-face of her husband, moon white and ill, Circles her like a prey she’d love to kill 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. But it is she who is paper now, warmed by no one.

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.