Words by Sylvia Plath

Axes 
After whose stroke the wood rings, 
And the echoes! 
Echoes traveling 
Off from the center like horses. 


The sap 
Wells like tears, like the 
Water striving 
To re-establish its mirror 
Over the rock 


That drops and turns, 
A white skull, 
Eaten by weedy greens. 
Years later I 
Encounter them on the road--- 


Words dry and riderless, 
The indefatigable hoof-taps. 
While 
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars 
Govern a life.

Elm by Sylvia Plath

for Ruth Fainlight


I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.


Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?


Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.


All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.


Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.


I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.


Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.


The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.


I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.


I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.


I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.


Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?


I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? ----


Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Death&Co by Sylvia Plath

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now——
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled¸ like Blake's.
Who exhibits


The birthmarks that are his trademark——
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak


Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple


Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.


The other does that
His hair long and plausive
Bastard
Masturbating a glitter
He wants to be loved.


I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.


Somebody's done for.