Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read Free Page B

sea.

    Gull-colored laces flap in the sea drafts
    Beside the postcard stalls.
    The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told:
    ‘These are the pretty trinkets the sea hides,
    Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.
    They do not come from the Bay of the Dead down there,
    But from another place, tropical and blue,
    We have never been to.
    These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold.’

The Moon and the Yew Tree
    This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
    The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
    The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
    Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
    Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
    Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
    I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
    The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
    White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
    It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
    With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
    Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
    Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
    At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
    The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
    The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
    The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
    Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
    How I would like to believe in tenderness –
    The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
    Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
    I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
    Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
    Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
    Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
    Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
    The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
    And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

Mirror
    I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
    Whatever I see I swallow immediately
    Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
    I am not cruel, only truthful –
    The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
    Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
    It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
    I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
    Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
    Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
    Searching my reaches for what she really is.
    Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
    I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
    She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
    I am important to her. She comes and goes.
    Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
    In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
    Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

The Babysitters
    It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.
    The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.
    That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.
    We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,
    In the two huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.
    When the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and Yardley cosmetics,
    I had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,
    And the seven-year-old wouldn’t go out unless his jersey stripes
    Matched the stripes of his socks.
    O it was richness! – eleven rooms and a yacht
    With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water
    And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.
    But I didn’t know how to cook, and babies depressed me.
    Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red
    With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.
    When the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their cruises
    They left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, ‘for protection’,
    And a small Dalmatian.

    In your house, the main house, you were better off.
    You had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop
    And a cook and a maid, and knew about