Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read Free Page A

sack of rocks.
    Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.
    He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue –
    How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
    Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
    A life baptized in no-life for a while,
    And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
    Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
    Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.
    His head is a little interior of gray mirrors.
    Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
    Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
    Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
    He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
    The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
    On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.
    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.
    The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
    And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
    Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

Wuthering Heights
    The horizons ring me like faggots,
    Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
    Touched by a match, they might warm me,
    And their fine lines singe
    The air to orange
    Before the distances they pin evaporate,
    Weighting the pale sky with a solider color.
    But they only dissolve and dissolve
    Like a series of promises, as I step forward.
    There is no life higher than the grasstops
    Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
    Pours by like destiny, bending
    Everything in one direction.
    I can feel it trying
    To funnel my heat away.
    If I pay the roots of the heather
    Too close attention, they will invite me
    To whiten my bones among them.
    The sheep know where they are,
    Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
    Gray as the weather.
    The black slots of their pupils take me in.
    It is like being mailed into space,
    A thin, silly message.
    They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
    All wig curls and yellow teeth
    And hard, marbly baas.

    I come to wheel ruts, and water
    Limpid as the solitudes
    That flee through my fingers.
    Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
    Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
    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 grass is beating its head distractedly.
    It is too delicate
    For a life in such company;
    Darkness terrifies it .
    Now, in valleys narrow
    And black as purses, the house lights
    Gleam like small change.

Finisterre
    This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,
    Cramped on nothing. Black
    Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding
    With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,
    Whitened by the faces of the drowned.
    Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks –
    Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.
    The sea cannons into their ear, but they don’t budge.
    Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.
    The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells
    Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,
    Almost too small for the mists to bother with.
    The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia –
    Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.
    They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.
    They go up without hope, like sighs.
    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 striding toward the horizon,
    Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.
    A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot
    A peasant woman in black
    Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.
    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