A Secret

A secret! A secret!
How superior.
You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman,
Holding up one palm-
A difference between us?
I have one eye, you have two.
The secret is stamped on you,
Faint, undulant watermark.
Will it show in the black detector?
Will it come out
Wavery, indelible, true
Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery,
The Moroccan hippopotamus?
They stare from a square, stiff frill.
They are for export,
One a fool, the other a fool.
A secret … An extra amber
Brandy finger
Roosting and cooing ‘You, you’
Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys.
A knife that can be taken out
To pare nails,
To lever the dirt.
‘It won’t hurt.’
An illegitimate baby-
That big blue head-
How it breathes in the bureau drawer!
‘Is that lingerie, pet?
‘It smells of salt cod, you had better
Stab a few cloves in an apple,
Make a sachet or
Do away with the bastard.
‘Do away with it altogether.’
‘No, no, it is happy there.’
‘But it wants to get out!
Look, look! It is wanting to crawl.’
My god, there goes the stopper!
The cars in the Place de la Concorde-
Watch out!
A stampede, a stampede!
Horns twirling and jungle gutturals!
An exploded bottle of stout,
Slack foam in the lap.
You stumble out,
Dwarf baby,
The knife in your back.
‘I feel weak.’
The secret is out.

by Sylvia Plath

A Sorcerer Bids Farewell To Seem

I’m through with this grand looking-glass hotel
where adjectives play croquet with flamingo nouns;
methinks I shall absent me for a while
from rhetoric of these rococo queens.
Item : chuck out royal rigmarole of props
and auction off each rare white-rabbit verb;
send my muse Alice packing with gaudy scraps
of mushroom simile and gryphon garb.
My native sleight-of-hand is wearing out :
mad hatter’s hat yields no new metaphor,
and jabberwock will not translate his songs :
it’s time to vanish like the cheshire cat
alone to that authentic island where
cabbages are cabbages; kings : kings.

by Sylvia Plath

A Winter's Tale

On Boston Common a red star
Gleams, wired to a tall Ulmus
Americana. Magi near
The domed State House.
Old Joseph holds an alpenstock.
Two waxen oxen flank the Child.
A black sheep leads the shepherds’ flock.
Mary looks mild.
Angels-more feminine and douce
Than models from Bonwit’s or Jay’s,
Haloes lustrous as Sirius-
Gilt trumpets raise.
By S. S. Pierce, by S. S. Pierce,
The red-nosed, blue-caped women ring
For money. Lord, the crowds are fierce!
There’s caroling
On Winter Street, on Temple Place.
Poodles are baking cookies in
Filene’s show windows. Grant us grace,
Donner, Blitzen,
And all you Santa’s deer who browse
By leave of the Park Commission
On grass that once fed Boston cows.
In unison
On Pinckney, Mount Vernon, Chestnut,
The wreathed doors open to the crowd.
Noel! Noel! No mouth is shut.
Off key and loud
The populace sings toward the sill
Of windows with odd violet panes.
O Little City on a Hill!
The cordial strains
Of bellringers and singers rouse
Frost-bitten pigeons, eddy forth
From Charles Street to the Custom House,
From South Station to North.

by Sylvia Plath

A Winter Ship

At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of.
Red and orange barges list and blister
Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy,
And apparently indestructible.
The sea pulses under a skin of oil.
A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole,
Riding the tide of the wind, steady
As wood and formal, in a jacket of ashes,
The whole flat harbor anchored in
The round of his yellow eye-button.
A blimp swims up like a day-moon or tin
Cigar over his rink of fishes.
The prospect is dull as an old etching.
They are unloading three barrels of little crabs.
The pier pilings seem about to collapse
And with them that rickety edifice
Of warehouses, derricks, smokestacks and bridges
In the distance. All around us the water slips
And gossips in its loose vernacular,
Ferrying the smells of cod and tar.
Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes —
A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers.
Even our shadows are blue with cold.
We wanted to see the sun come up
And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,
Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost,
Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay
Encased in a glassy pellicle.
The sun will diminish it soon enough:
Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.

by Sylvia Plath

Above The Oxbow

Here in this valley of discrete academies
We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks
To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock,
Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest.
Still, they’re out best mustering of height: by
Comparison with the sunnken silver-grizzled
Back of the Connecticut, the river-level
Flats of Hadley farms, they’re lofty enough
Elevations to be called something more than hills.
Green, wholly green, they stand their knobby spine
Against our sky: they are what we look southward to
Up Pleasant Street at Main. Poising their shapes
Between the snuff and red tar-paper apartments,
They mound a summer coolness in our view.
To people who live in the bottom of valleys
A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks
To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic
In going up for the coming down if the post
We start at’s the same post we finish by,
But it’s the clear conversion at the top can hold
Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful
Wish for even ground, and it’s the last cliff
Ledge will dislodge out cramped concept of space, unwall
Horizons beyond vision, spill vision
After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye
To full capacity. We climb to hopes
Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,
Blindered by green, under a green-grained sky
Into the blue. Tops define themselves as places
Where nothing higher’s to be looked to. Downward looks
Follow the black arrow-backs of swifts on their track
Of the air eddies’ loop and arc though air’s at rest
To us, since we see no leaf edge stir high
Here on a mount overlaid with leaves. The paint-peeled
Hundred-year-old hotel sustains its ramshackle
Four-way veranda, view-keeping above
The fallen timbers of its once remarkable
Funicular railway, witness to gone
Time, and to graces gone with the time. A state view-
Keeper collects half-dollars for the slopes
Of state scenery, sells soda, shows off viewpoints.
A ruffy skylight oaints the gray oxbow
And paints the river’s pale circumfluent stillness.
As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux
Of the desultory currents — all that unique
Stripple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost
In the simplified orderings of sky-
Lorded perspectives. Maplike, the far fields are ruled
By correct green lines and no seedy free-for-all
Of asparagus heads. Cars run their suave
Colored beads on the strung roads, and the people stroll
Straightforwardly across the springing green.
All’s peace and discipline down there. Till lately we
Lived under the shadow of hot rooftops
And never saw how coolly we might move. For once
A high hush quietens the crickets’ cry.

by Sylvia Plath

Aerialist

Aerialist
Each night, this adroit young lady
Lies among sheets
Shredded fine as snowflakes
Until dream takes her body
From bed to strict tryouts
In tightrope acrobatics.
Nightly she balances
Cat-clever on perilous wire
In a gigantic hall,
Footing her delicate dances
To whipcrack and roar
Which speak her maestro’s will.
Gilded, coming correct
Across that sultry air,
She steps, halts, hung
In dead center of her act
As great weights drop all about her
And commence to swing.
Lessoned thus, the girl
Parries the lunge and menace
Of every pendulum;
By deft duck and twirl
She draws applause; bright harness
Bites keen into each brave limb
Then, this tough stint done, she curtsies
And serenely plummets down
To traverse glass floor
And get safe home; but, turning with trained eyes,
Tiger-tamer and grinning clown
Squat, bowling black balls at her.
Tall trucks roll in
With a thunder like lions; all aims
And lumbering moves
To trap this outrageous nimble queen
And shatter to atoms
Her nine so slippery lives.
Sighting the stratagem
Of black weight, black ball, black truck,
With a last artful dodge she leaps
Through hoop of that hazardous dream
To sit up stark awake
As the loud alarmclock stops.
Now as penalty for her skill,
By day she must walk in dread
Steel gauntlets of traffic, terror-struck
Lest, out of spite, the whole
Elaborate scaffold of sky overhead
Fall racketing finale on her luck.

by Sylvia Plath

Admonition

If you dissect a bird
To diagram the tongue
You’ll cut the chord
Articulating song.
If you flay a beast
To marvel at the mane
You’ll wreck the rest
From which the fur began.
If you pluck out the heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.

by Sylvia Plath

Alicante Lullaby

In Alicante they bowl the barrels
Bumblingly over the nubs of the cobbles
Past the yellow-paella eateries,
Below the ramshackle back-alley balconies,
While the cocks and hens
In the roofgardens
Scuttle repose with crowns and cackles.
Kumquat-colored trolleys ding as they trundle
Passengers under an indigo fizzle
Needling spumily down from the wires:
Alongside the sibliant narhor the lovers
Hear loudspeakers boom
From each neon-lit palm
Rumbas and sambas no ear-flaps can muffle.
O Cacophony, goddess of jazz and of quarrels,
Crack-throated mistress of bagpipes and cymbals,
Let be your con brios, your capricciosos,
Crescendos, cadenzas, prestos and pretissimos,
My head on the pillow
(Piano, pianissimo)
Lullayed by susurrous lyres and viols.

by Sylvia Plath

All The Dead Dears

Rigged poker -stiff on her back
With a granite grin
This antique museum-cased lady
Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.
These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game
We’d wink at if we didn’t hear
Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,
Our own grist down to its bony face.
How they grip us through think and thick,
These barnacle dead!
This lady here’s no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she’ll suck
Blood and whistle my narrow clean
To prove it. As I think now of her hand,
From the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother
Reach hag hands to haul me in,
And an image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing this hair —
All the long gone darlings: They
Get back, though, soon,
Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,
Childbirths or a family barbecue:
Any touch, taste, tang’s
Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,
And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair
Between tick
And tack of the clock, until we go,
Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver
Riddled with ghosts, to lie
Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.

by Sylvia Plath

Among The Narcissi

Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.

The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.

There is a dignity to this; there is a formality-
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!

And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

by Sylvia Plath

Amnesiac

No use, no use, now, begging Recognize!
There is nothing to do with such a beautiful blank but smooth it.
Name, house, car keys,
The little toy wife-
Erased, sigh, sigh.
Four babies and a cocker!
Nurses the size of worms and a minute doctor
Tuck him in.
Old happenings
Peel from his skin.
Down the drain with all of it!
Hugging his pillow
Like the red-headed sister he never dared to touch,
He dreams of a new one-
Barren, the lot are barren!
And of another color.
How they’ll travel, travel, travel, scenery
Sparking off their brother-sister rears
A comet tail!
And money the sperm fluid of it all.
One nurse brings in
A green drink, one a blue.
They rise on either side of him like stars.
The two drinks flame and foam.
O sister, mother, wife,
Sweet Lethe is my life.
I am never, never, never coming home!

by Sylvia Plath

An Appearance

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me.
Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!
I hear her great heart purr.
From her lips ampersands and percent signs
Exit like kisses.
It is Monday in her mind: morals
Launder and present themselves.
What am I to make of these contradictions?
I wear white cuffs, I bow.
Is this love then, this red material
Issuing from the steele needle that flies so blindingly?
It will make little dresses and coats,
It will cover a dynasty.
How her body opens and shuts –
A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges!
O heart, such disorganization!
The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.
ABC, her eyelids say.

by Sylvia Plath

Apprehensions

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself-
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.
A grey wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.
This red wall winces continually:
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two grey, papery bags-
This is what i am made of, this, and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and rain of pietas.
On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel their heads and cry.
There is no talk of immorality among these!
Cold blanks approach us:
They move in a hurry.

by Sylvia Plath

Aquatic Nocturne

deep in liquid
turquoise slivers
of dilute light
quiver in thin streaks
of bright tinfoil
on mobile jet:
pale flounder
waver by
tilting silver:
in the shallows
agile minnows
flicker gilt:
grapeblue mussels
dilate lithe and
pliant valves:
dull lunar globes
of blubous jellyfish
glow milkgreen:
eels twirl
in wily spirals
on elusive tails:
adroir lobsters
amble darkly olive
on shrewd claws:
down where sound
comes blunt and wan
like the bronze tone
of a sunken gong.

by Sylvia Plath

April Aubade

Worship this world of watercolor mood
in glass pagodas hung with veils of green
where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood
and sap ascends the steeple of the vein.
A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals
to waken dreamers in the milky dawn,
while tulips bow like a college of cardinals
before that papal paragon, the sun.
Christened in a spindrift of snowdrop stars,
where on pink-fluted feet the pigeons pass
and jonquils sprout like solomon’s metaphors,
my love and I go garlanded with grass.
Again we are deluded and infer
that somehow we are younger than we were.

by Sylvia Plath

The slime

the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull
and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation
I would not remember you
or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these
and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops
a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight

by Sylvia Plath

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! –The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks —
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air —
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel —
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.

by Sylvia Plath