Crossing the Water Quotes

“The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“Love Letter"

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.
You didn't just tow me an inch, no-
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter-
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chisled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I was was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mice-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.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“This month is fit for little.
The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.
A red tongue is among us.
Mother, keep out of my barnyard,
I am becoming another.

Dog-head, devourer:
Feed me the berries of dark.
The lids won't shut. Time
Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun
its endless glitter.

I must swallow it all.

Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat-
Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?
In this light the blood is black.
Tell me my name.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“ama asıl son kez yattığımda bilinecek değerim:
ağaçlar dokunabilir o zaman, bana ayıracak zamanları olur çiçeklerin.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“Not easy to state the change you made. / If I'm alive now, then I was dead”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“What am I doing
with a lung full of dust
and a tongue of wood,
Knee-deep in the cold
swamped by flowers?

— Sylvia Plath, from "Leaving Early,” Crossing the Water. (Harper Perennial May 9, 1980) Originally published 1971.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“Living with her was like living with my own coffin:
Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“I think of the lizards airing their tongues / In the crevice of an extremely small shadow / And the toad guarding his heart's droplet. / The desert is white as a blind man's eye, / Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird / Doze behind the old masks of fury. / We swelter like firedogs in the wind. / The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie / The heat-cracked crickets congregate / In their black armorplate and cry. / The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother, / And the crickets come creeping into our hair / To fiddle the short night away.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“The woods creak and ache, and the day forgets itself. / I bend over this drained basin where the small fish / Flex as the mud freezes. / They glitter like eyes, and I collect them all. / Morgue of old logs and old images, the lake / Opens and shuts, accepting them among its reflections.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“The day empties its images / Like a cup or a room. The moon's crook whitens, / Thin as the skin seaming a scar.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all. / We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off, / Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water. / We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up. / I see us floating there yet, inseparable—two cork dolls. / What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut? / The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock, / And from our opposite continents we wave and call. / Everything has happened.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty

“And night arrives in one gigantic step. / It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little. These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people: // They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold. / In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for. / I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”
― Sylvia Plath, Crossing the Water: Sylvia Plath's Triumphant Poetry Collection Exploring Tensions Between Desire and Duty