Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read Online Free PDF

panic,
    You have stuck her kittens outside your window
    In a sort of cement well
    Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.
    You say you can’t stand her,
    The bastard’s a girl.
    You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio
    Clear of voices and history, the staticky
    Noise of the new.
    You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
    You say I should drown my girl.
    She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.
    The baby smiles, fat snail,
    From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
    You could eat him. He’s a boy.
    You say your husband is just no good to you.
    His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.
    You have one baby, I have two.
    I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
    I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
    We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
    Me and you.
    Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.
    I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
    The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
    Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,
    Our bones, our hair.
    I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.
    The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
    Once you were beautiful.
    In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: ‘Through?
    Gee baby, you are rare.’
    You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.
    The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.
    I try to keep him in,
    An old pole for the lightning,
    The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.
    He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,
    Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.
    The blue sparks spill,
    Splitting like quartz into a million bits.
    O jewel! O valuable!
    That night the moon
    Dragged its blood bag, sick
    Animal
    Up over the harbor lights.
    And then grew normal,
    Hard and apart and white.
    The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.
    We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,
    Working it like dough, a mulatto body,
    The silk grits.
    A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.
    Now I am silent, hate
    Up to my neck,
    Thick, thick.
    I do not speak.
    I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
    I am packing the babies,
    I am packing the sick cats.
    O vase of acid,
    It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
    He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate
    That opens to the sea
    Where it drives in, white and black,
    Then spews it back.
    Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
    You are so exhausted.
    Your voice my ear-ring,
    Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.
    That is that. That is that.
    Your peer from the door,
    Sad hag. ‘Every woman’s a whore.
    I can’t communicate.’
    I see your cute décor
    Close on you like the fist of a baby
    Or an anemone, that sea
    Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.
    I am still raw.
    I say I may be back.
    You know what lies are for.
    Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.

Cut
    for Susan O’Neill Roe
    What a thrill –
    My thumb instead of an onion.
    The top quite gone
    Except for a sort of a hinge
    Of skin,
    A flap like a hat,
    Dead white.
    Then that red plush.
    Little pilgrim,
    The Indian’s axed your scalp.
    Your turkey wattle
    Carpet rolls
    Straight from the heart.
    I step on it,
    Clutching my bottle
    Of pink fizz.
    A celebration, this is.
    Out of a gap
    A million soldiers run,
    Redcoats, every one.
    Whose side are they on?
    O my
    Homunculus, I am ill.
    I have taken a pill to kill

    The thin
    Papery feeling.
    Saboteur,
    Kamikaze man –
    The stain on your
    Gauze Ku Klux Klan
    Babushka
    Darkens and tarnishes and when
    The balled
    Pulp of your heart
    Confronts its small
    Mill of silence
    How you jump –
    Trepanned veteran,
    Dirty girl,
    Thumb stump.

By Candlelight
    This is winter, this is night, small love –
    A sort of black horsehair,
    A rough, dumb country stuff
    Steeled with the sheen
    Of what green stars can make it to our gate.
    I hold you on my arm.
    It is very late.
    The dull bells tongue the hour.
    The mirror floats us at one candle power.
    This is the fluid in which we meet each other,
    This haloey