Sylvia Plath

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
Any more, black
In which I have lived like a
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