Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——
A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Love set you going like a fat gold watch
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald
Took its place among the elements
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival

Sharded in black, like beetles,
Frail as antique
One breath might shiver to bits,
The old women creep out

First, are you our sort of a person
Do you wearA glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again
(I think I made you up inside my head
)The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,

Empty,
I echo to the least footfall,
Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas
In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head—God-ball,

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,

(Rock Lake,
Canada)In this country there is neither measure nor
To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,
The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds

Not easy to state the change you made
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit

Kindness glides about my house
Dame Kindness, she is so nice
The blue and red jewels of her rings
In the windows, the

Old goatherds swear how all night long they
The warning whirr and burring of the
Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works
Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder

Gold mouths cry with the green youngcertainty of the bronze boyremembering a thousand autumnsand how a hundred thousand leavescame sliding down his shoulder bladespersuaded by his bronze heroic reason
We ignore the coming doom of goldand we a...

If you dissect a
To diagram the
You'll cut the
Articulating song

Behind him the hotdogs split and
On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
Gas tanks, factory stacks- that
Of imperfections his bowels were part of-Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught

You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight
Mummy-cloths, smiling:
I'm all right