#Sylvia Plath poem | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

azure-cherie · 2 years

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Sylvia Plath for each zodiac

Aries

Burning the Letters

I made a fire; being tired Of the white fists of old Letters and their death rattle When I came too close to the wastebasket. What did they know that I didn’t ? Grain by grain, they unrolled Sands where a dream of clear water Grinned like a getaway car. I am not subtle Love, love, and well, I was tired Of cardboard cartons the color of cement or a dog pack Holding in its hate Dully, under a pack of men in red jackets, And the eyes and times of the postmarks. This fire may lick and fawn, but it is merciless: A glass case My fingers would enter although They melt and sag, they are told Do not touch. And here is an end to the writing, The spry hooks that bend and cringe, and the smiles, the smiles. And at least it will be a good place now, the attic. At least I won’t be strung just under the surface, Dumb fish With one tin eye, Watching for glints, Riding my Arctic Between this wish and that wish.

This fire may lick and fawn, but it is merciless: A glass case My fingers would enter although They melt and sag, they are told Do not touch. And here is an end to the writing, The spry hooks that bend and cringe, and the smiles, the smiles. And at least it will be a good place now, the attic. At least I won’t be strung just under the surface, Dumb fish With one tin eye, Watching for glints, Riding my Arctic Between this wish and that wish.

So I poke at the carbon birds in my housedress. They are more beautiful than my bodiless owl, They console me — Rising and flying, but blinded. They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels Only they have nothing to say to anybody. I have seen to that. With the butt of a rake I flake up papers that breathe like people, I fan them out Between the yellow lettuces and the German cabbage Involved in its weird blue dreams, Involved as a foetus. And a name with black edges.

Wilts at my foot, Sinuous orchis In a nest of root-hairs and boredom — Pale eyes, patent-leather gutturals! Warm rain greases my hair, extinguishes nothing. My veins glow like trees. The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like — A red burst and a cry That splits from its ripped bag and does not stop With the dead eye And the stuffed expression, but goes on Dyeing the air, Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water What immortality is. That it is immortal.

Taurus

Rhyme

I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gut’s Honeycombed with golden eggs, Yet won’t lay one. She, addled in her goose-wit, struts The barnyard like those taloned hags Who ogle men

And crimp their wrinkles in a grin, Jangling their great money bags. While I eat grits She fattens on the finest grain. Now, as I hone my knife, she begs Pardon, and that’s

So humbly done, I’d turn this keen Steel on myself before profit By such a rogue’s Act, but—how those feathers shine!Exit from a smoking slit Her ruby dregs.

Gemini

Two Views of a Cadaver Room

(1)

The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. A sallow piece of string held it together.

In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.

(2)

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.

Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner.

Cancer

The Everlasting Monday

Thou shalt have an everlasting Monday and stand in the moon.

The moon’s man stands in his shell, Bent under a bundle Of sticks. The light falls chalk and cold Upon our bedspread. His teeth are chattering among the leprous Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes.

He also against black frost Would pick sticks, would not rest Until his own lit room outshone Sunday’s ghost of sun; Now works his hell of Mondays in the moon’s ball, Fireless, seven chill seas chained to his ankle.

Leo

By Candlelight

This is winter, this is night, small love— A sort of black horsehair, A rough, dumb country stuff Steeled with the sheen Of what green stars can make it to our gate. I hold you on my arm. It is very late. The dull bells tongue the hour. The mirror floats us at one candle power.

This is the fluid in which we meet each other, This haloey radiance that seems to breathe And lets our shadows wither Only to blow Them huge again, violent giants on the wall. One match scratch makes you real. At first the candle will not bloom at all — It snuffs its bud To almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.

I hold my breath until you creak to life, Balled hedgehog, Small and cross. The yellow knife Grows tall. You clutch your bars. My singing makes you roar. I rock you like a boat Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor, While the brass man Kneels, back bent, as best he can

Hefting his white pillar with the light That keeps the sky at bay, The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight! He is yours, the little brassy Atlas — Poor heirloom, all you have, At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs, No child, no wife. Five balls! Five bright brass balls! To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.

Virgo

Virgin in a tree

How this tart fable instructsAnd mocks! Here's the parody of that moral mousetrapSet in the proverbs stitched on samplersApproving chased girls who get them to a treeAnd put on bark's nun-black

Habit which deflects All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shapeIn a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers,Whether goat-thighed or god-haloed. Ever since that first DaphneSwitched her incomparable back

For a bay-tree hide, respect'sTwined to her hard limbs like ivy: the puritan lipCries: 'Celebrate Syrinx whose demursWon her the frog-colored skin, pale pith and wateryBed of a reed. Look:

Pine-needle armor protectsPitys from Pan's assault! And though age drop Their leafy crowns, their fame soars,Eclipsing Eva, Cleo and Helen of Troy:For which of those would speak

For a fashion that constrictsWhite bodies in a wooden girdle, root to topUnfaced, unformed, the nipple-flowersShrouded to suckle darkness? Only theyWho keep cool and holy make

A sanctum to attract Green virgins, consecrating limb and lipTo chastity's service: like prophets, like preachers,They descant on the serene and seraphic beautyOf virgins for virginity's sake.'

Be certain some such pact'sBeen struck to keep all glory in the gripOf ugly spinsters and barren sirsAs you etch on the inner window of your eyeThis virgin on her rack:

She, ripe and unplucked, 'sLain splayed too long in the tortuous boughs: overripeNow, dour-faced, her fingers Stiff as twigs, her body woodenly Askew, she'll ache and wake

Though doomsday bud. Neglect'sGiven her lips that lemon-tasting droop:Untongued, all beauty's bright juice sours.Tree-twist will ape this gross anatomyTill irony's bough break.

Libra

Epitaph for Fire and Flower

You might as well haul up This wave’s green peak on wire To prevent fall, or anchor the fluent air In quartz, as crack your skull to keep These two most perishable lovers from the touch That will kindle angels’ envy, scorch and drop Their fond hearts charred as any match.

Seek no stony camera-eye to fix The passing dazzle of each face In black and white, or put on ice Mouth’s instant flare for future looks; Stars shoot their petals, and suns run to seed, However you may sweat to hold such darling wrecks Hived like honey in your head.

Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig He kings it, navel-knit to no groan, But at the price of a pin-stitched skin Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.

Mouth’s instant flare for future looks; Stars shoot their petals, and suns run to seed, However you may sweat to hold such darling wrecks Hived like honey in your head.

Now in the crux of their vows hang your ear, Still as a shell: hear what an age of glass These lovers prophesy to lock embrace Secure in museum diamond for the stare Of astounded generations; they wrestle To conquer cinder’s kingdom in the stroke of an hour And hoard faith safe in a fossil.

But though they’d rivet sinews in rock And have every weathercock kiss hang fire As if to outflame a phoenix, the moment’s spur Drives nimble blood too quick For a wish to tether: they ride nightlong In their heartbeats’ blazing wake until red cock Plucks bare that comet’s flowering.

Dawn snuffs out star’s spent wick, Even as love’s dear fools cry evergreen, And a languor of wax congeals the vein No matter how fiercely lit; staunch contracts break And recoil in the altering light: the radiant limb Blows ash in each lover’s eye; the ardent look Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.

Scorpio

November Graveyard

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the heart, pare bone Free of the Fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

Saggitarius

Maenad

Once I was ordinary: Sat by my father’s bean tree Eating the fingers of wisdom. The birds made milk. When it thundered I hid under a flat stone.

The mother of mouths didn’t love me. The old man shrank to a doll. O I am too big to go backward: Birdmilk is feathers, The bean leaves are dumb as hands.

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 these others in the moon’s vat— Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds? In this light the blood is black. Tell me my name.

Capricorn

Recantation

‘Tea leaves I’ve given up, And that crooked line On the queen’s palm Is no more my concern. On my black pilgrimage This moon-pocked crystal ball Will break before it help; Rather than croak out What’s to come, My darling ravens are flown.

‘Forswear those freezing tricks of sight And all else I’ve taught Against the flower in the blood: Not wealth nor wisdom stands Above the simple vein, The straight mouth. Go to your greenhorn youth Before time ends And do good With your white hands.’

Aquarius

Insomniac

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole — A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie Exposes embarrassments—the mizzling days Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams, Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful, A garden of buggy roses that made him cry. His forehead is bumpy as 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.

Pisces

The Sleepers

No map traces the street Where those two sleepers are. We have lost track of it. They lie as if under water In a blue, unchanging light, The French window ajar

Curtained with yellow lace. Through the narrow crack Odors of wet earth rise. The snail leaves a silver track; Dark thickets hedge the house. We take a backward look.

Among petals pale as death And leaves steadfast in shape They sleep on, mouth to mouth. A white mist is going up. The small green nostrils breathe, And they turn in their sleep.

Ousted from that warm bed We are a dream they dream. Their eyelids keep the shade. No harm can come to them. We cast our skins and slide Into another time.

Thank you 💕