Free Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath Page A

of blood, the sleep-talking virgin
    Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man,
    Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg:
    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.

Resolve
    Day of mist: day of tarnish
    with hands
    unserviceable, I wait
    for the milk van
    the one-eared cat
    laps its gray paw
    and the coal fire burns
    outside, the little hedge leaves are
    become quite yellow
    a milk-film blurs
    the empty bottles on the windowsill
    no glory descends
    two water drops poise
    on the arched green
    stem of my neighbor’s rose bush
    o bent bow of thorns
    the cat unsheathes its claws
    the world turns
    today
    today I will not
    disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners
    or bunch my fist
    in the wind’s sneer.

Night Shift
    It was not a heart, beating,
    That muted boom, that clangor
    Far off, not blood in the ears
    Drumming up any fever
    To impose on the evening.
    The noise came from outside:
    A metal detonating
    Native, evidently, to
    These stilled suburbs: nobody
    Startled at it, though the sound
    Shook the ground with its pounding.
    It took root at my coming
    Till the thudding source, exposed,
    Confounded inept guesswork:
    Framed in windows of Main Street’s
    Silver factory, immense
    Hammers hoisted, wheels turning,
    Stalled, let fall their vertical
    Tonnage of metal and wood;
    Stunned the marrow. Men in white
    Undershirts circled, tending
    Without stop those greased machines,
    Tending, without stop, the blunt
    Indefatigable fact.

Full Fathom Five
    Old man, you surface seldom.
    Then you come in with the tide’s coming
    When seas wash cold, foam-
    Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
    A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
    Crest and trough. Miles long
    Extend the radial sheaves
    Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
    Knotted, caught, survives
    The old myth of origins
    Unimaginable. You float near
    As keeled ice-mountains
    Of the north, to be steered clear
    Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
    Starts with a danger:
    Your dangers are many. I
    Cannot look much but your form suffers
    Some strange injury
    And seems to die: so vapors
    Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
    The muddy rumors
    Of your burial move me
    To half-believe: your reappearance
    Proves rumors shallow,

    For the archaic trenched lines
    Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
    Ages beat like rains
    On the unbeaten channels
    Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
    Durance are whirlpools
    To make away with the ground-
    Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.
    Waist down, you may wind
    One labyrinthine tangle
    To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
    Skulls. Inscrutable,
    Below shoulders not once
    Seen by any man who kept his head,
    You defy questions;
    You defy other godhood.
    I walk dry on your kingdom’s border
    Exiled to no good.
    Your shelled bed I remember.
    Father, this thick air is murderous.
    I would breathe water.

Suicide off Egg Rock
    Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
    On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
    Gas tanks, factory stacks – that landscape
    Of imperfections his bowels were part of –
    Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
    Sun struck the water like a damnation.
    No pit of shadow to crawl into,
    And his blood beating the old tattoo
    I am, I am, I am. Children
    Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift
    Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.
    A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
    Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.
    He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,
    His body beached with the sea’s garbage,
    A machine to breathe and beat forever.
    Flies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole
    Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.
    The words in his book wormed off the pages.
    Everything glittered like blank paper.
    Everything shrank in the sun’s corrosive
    Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
    He heard when he walked into the water
    The forgetful surf