Found Poems: Sylvia Plath
Above the Oxbow
A haze blurred Hadley fields to a muzzy green,
the river flowed—dull molten pewter.
Boston, January 1959
Boston is filthy:
a drift of weekly soot on the windows,
the windows smeared with greasy cooking exhalations,
dust under the bed and all over,
appearing miraculously every day,
thrown and shaken out the window,
and seeping in again.
Concretest detail
A round white moon
smaller than a penny
blue-beaming through
the bathroom window slats
I myself am the vessel of tragic experience
The three red apples,
yellow speckled,
thumb-dinted brown,
mock me.
Minute Joys
As for minute joys:
as I was saying: do you realize
the illicit sensuous delight
I get from picking my nose?
I always have,
ever since I was a child—
there are so many subtle variations of sensation.
A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger
can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucous
in the nostril and draw them out
to be looked at, crumbled between fingers,
and flicked to the floor in minute crusts.
Or a heavier,
determined forefinger
can reach up and smear down-and-out
the soft, resilient, elastic
greenish-yellow
smallish blobs of mucous,
roll them round and jelly-like
between thumb and fore finger,
and spread them on the under surface of a desk or chair
where they will harden into organic crusts.
How many desks and chairs have I thus secretively befouled since childhood?
Or sometimes there will be blood
mingled with the mucous: in dry brown scabs,
or bright sudden wet red on the finger
that scraped too rudely the nasal membranes.
God, what a sexual satisfaction!
It is absorbing to look with new sudden eyes
on the old worn habits: to see a sudden
luxurious and pestilential
“snot-green sea,”
and shiver with the shock of
recognition.
No thanks
We reject the Merwins’ flat:
the rejection grows,
green reddens & plop,
it drops full plump into our laps—
the noisy street,
the filthy bathroom,
dark bedroom
& no doubt Dido’s hairpins
& hairscruffs
in all the floorboard cracks.
Percy Key Among the Narcissi
I.
Well, Percy Key is dying. That is the verdict.
Poor old Perce, says everybody. Rose comes up almost every day.
“Te-ed” she calls in her hysterical, throbbing voice. And Ted comes,
from the study, the tennis court, the orchard, wherever,
to lift the dying man from his armchair to his bed. He is very quiet afterwards.
He is a bag of bones, says Ted. I saw him in one “turn” or “do”,
lying back on the bed, toothless, all beakiness of nose and chin,
eyes sunken as if they were not, shuddering and blinking in a fearful way.
And all about the world is gold and green,
dripping with laburnum and buttercups and the sweet stench of June.
In the cottage the fire is on and it is a dark twilight.
The midwife said Percy would go into a coma this weekend
and then “anything could happen”.
The sleeping pills the doctor gives him don’t work, says Rose.
II.
He is calling all night: Rose, Rose, Rose. It has happened so quickly.
First Rose stopped the doctor in January when I had the baby
for a look at Percy’s running eye and a check on his weight-loss. Then he was in hospital
for lung x-rays. Then in again for a big surgery for “something on the lung”.
“Ted, Ted, come quick, I think Percy’s had a stroke.”
We flung the door open, & there was Rose Key, wild-eyed,
clutching her open blouse which showed her slip and gabbling.
“I've called the doctor,” she cried, turning to rush back to her cottage, Ted after her.
I thought I would stay and wait, and then something in me said,
now, you must see this, you have never seen a stroke or a dead person.
So I went. Percy was in his chair in front of the television set,
twitching in a fearsome way, utterly gone off,
mumbling over what I thought must be his false teeth,
his eyes twitching askew, and shaking as if pierced by weak electric shocks.
Rose clutched Ted.
I stared from the doorway.
III.
The doctor’s car drew immediately up by the hedge at the bottom of the lane.
He came very slowly and ceremoniuosly, head seriously lowered, to the door.
Ready to meet death, I suppose.
He said Thank you, and we melted back to the house.
I have been waiting for this, I said. And Ted said he had, too. I was seized
by dry retching at the thought of that horrible mumbling over false teeth. A disgust.
“The nurse told us to sit out. There's no more we can do. Isn't it awful to see him like this?”
See him if you like, she told me.
I went in through the quiet kitchen with Ted. The livingroom was full,
still, hot with some awful translation taking place.
Percy lay back on a heap of white pillows in his striped pajamas,
his face already passed from humanity, the nose a spiralling fleshless beak in thin air,
the chin fallen in a point from it, like an opposite pole,
and the mouth like an inverted black heart
stamped into the yellow flesh between, a great raucous breath
coming and going there with great effort like an awful bird, caught,
but about to depart. His eyes showed through partly open lids
like dissolved soaps or a clotted pus.
IV.
I was very sick at this and had a bad migraine over my left eye for the rest of the day.
The end, even of so marginal a man, a horror.
Percy was still on the bed, very yellow, his jaw bound and a book,
a big brown book, propping it till it stiffened properly.
When I went down they had just brought the coffin & put him in.
The livingroom where he had lain was in an upheaval—
bed rolled from the wall, mattresses on the lawn, sheets and pillows washed & airing.
He lay in the sewing room, or parlor, in a long coffin
of orangey soap-colored oak with silver handles, the lid propped
against the wall at his head with a silver scroll: Percy Key, Died June 25, 1962.
The raw date a shock. A sheet covered the coffin. Rose lifted it.
A pale white beaked face, as of paper, rose under
the veil that covered the hole cut in the glued white cloth cover.
The mouth looked glued, the face powdered.
She quickly put down the sheet. I hugged her.
She kissed me and burst into tears.
V.
The dark, rotund sister from London with purple eye-circles deplored:
They have no hearse, they have only a cart.
They are going to call for the corpse, we said;
we left a grocery order.
The awful feeling of great grins coming onto the face, unstoppable.
A relief; this is the hostage for death, we are safe for the time-being.
We strolled round the church in the bright heat,
the pollarded green limes like green balls, the far hills red, just ploughed,
and one stocked with newly glittering wheat.
Debated whether to wait out, or go in.
Elsie, with her stump-foot was going in.
Then Grace, Jim’s wife. We went in.
Heard priest meeting corpse at gate, incantating, coming close. Hairraising.
We stood. The flowery casket, nodding and flirting its petals, led up the aisle.
Then we followed the funeral party after the casket
out the side door to the street going up the hill to the cemetery.
VI.
Behind the high black cart, which had started up
with the priest swaying in black and white at a decorous pace, the funeral cars—
one car, a taxi, then Jack Crawford, looking green and scared, in his big new red car.
We got in with him.
“Well, old Perce always wanted to be buried in Devon.”
You could see he felt he was next. I felt tears come.
Ted motioned me to look at the slow uplifted faces of children in the primary school yard,
all seated on rest rugs, utterly without grief, only bland curiosity, turning after us.
We got out at the cemetary gate, the day blazing.
Followed the black backs of the women.
Six bowler hats of the bearers left at the first yew bushes in the grass.
The coffin on boards, words said, ashses to ashes—
that is what remained, not glory, not heaven.
The amazingly narrow coffin lowered into the narrow red earth opening, left.
VII.
The women led round, in a kind of goodbye circle,
Rose rapt and beautiful and frozen, the Catholic
dropping a handfull of earth which clattered.
A great impulse welled in me to cast earth also,
but it seemed as if it might be indecent,
hurrying Percy into oblivion.
We left the open grave. An unfinished feeling.
Is he to be left up there uncovered, all alone?
Walked home over the back hill, gathering immense stalks
of fuchsia foxgloves and swinging our jackets in the heat.
Ted & I hugged each other.
Frieda looked on peacefully from her lunch, her big blue eyes untroubled & clear.
Sylvia Plath's Dicks: A Collage
I shall tell you about Dick for a little while.
Oh, Dick, how wonderful to see you.
I still remember the day I drove up with Dick—
New Haven, New Jersey, New York—Dick!
Where I walked with Dick…
And Dick—and rest and sleep.
Dick is real only in that time.
But who is Dick? Who am I?
Dick and I are doomed to compete always.
Dick is gregarious;
I would have Dick be a surgeon.
Time present is Non-Dick.
Why then Dick is naught but an unsigned picture.
I got a sinus infection for a week. I saw Dick.
See Dick? Damned if I am!
A letter from Dick. Sick with envy—
Saw Dick get tuberculosis:
It shut me in a rock cave with Dick.
And Dick is recriminating himself, readjusting.
Irony it is to see Dick raised, lifted to the pinnacles of irresponsibility.
Hoping I do not want primarily to escape dick.
Dick is suddenly too stocky, too heavy, too short.
Began clearly to remember Dick.
Ironically, Dick now has swung to my way…
And Dick, the recurring main theme.
Dick unhappy, me unhappy.
I keep thinking of me dancing with Dick:
The idealization of Dick
and sun, and Dick and the late dates.
Dick is out because of innumerable reasons.
Two days more of living, and then Dick.
I don't even want to go up and see dick.
Sylvia Plath's Questions
How can I know who I am?
Why can't I throw myself into writing?
Will I write a word?
Where, how, with what & for what to begin?
Is anyone anywhere happy?
What is my voice?
What am I afraid of?
How important is all this?
Is that why I cry?
Why did Virginia Woolf commit suicide?
Where does that leave me?
Will I break through someday?
Will I ever be liked for anything other than the wrong reasons?
What, alas & hoho, must they think of me?
Where is the girl that I was last year?
How shall I act toward her without feeling a hypocrite?
Why am I free to write her?
Is there ever enough time in the world?
Is man, in this sense, born in original sin?
Will I ever stop these wet sneezes?
Why so weary, so slack all winter?
What could frost my cake more?
How does her father come into this?
Where will the careless conglomeration of environment, heredity and stimulus lead me?
Where were you hurt?
Is it dangerous to be happy?
How to end it?
Will it work out?
What would the neighbors say?
Why do they have to tease me?
Why do I punish myself by not looking at them?
Where are the violent argumentative friends?
What vision of madness in a mad world?
Is that a criterion?
Will there be pain?
How do you defend yourself in case of attack?
Why these dreams? Is it because I feel a ghost—?
Where am I? Will I live to tell of it?
What is life? How to make it sound special?
This I enjoy
The ash bits from the black wired box
seiving the red-brick chimney soot
are winking and somersaulting down,
bright white like snowflakes
in the shadow of the building,
caught by the sun.
Sylvia Plath's Trolleys
bedpan trolleys
mouthwash trolleys
breakfast trolleys
tea trolleys
medicine trolleys
trolleys of valiant but dying flowers
