Sylvia Plath -- October 27, 1932

Sylvia Plath  October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

Prolific American poet and writer, Plath struggled with depression throughout her short life. She committed suicide at the age of 31. In 1982 she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems. 





Balloons
Sylvia Plath

Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,
Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish ----
Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!
Straw mats, white walls
And these traveling
Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free
Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.





Conversation Among The Ruins
Sylvia Plath

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;
While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I have sit
Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,
Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:
Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?






Elm
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.





Gigolo
Sylvia Plath

Pocket watch, I tick well.
The streets are lizardly crevices
Sheer-sided, with holes where to hide.
It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac,

A palace of velvet
With windows of mirrors.
There one is safe,
There are no family photographs,

No rings through the nose, no cries.
Bright fish hooks, the smiles of women
Gulp at my bulk
And I, in my snazzy blacks,

Mill a litter of breasts like jellyfish.
To nourish
The cellos of moans I eat eggs --
Eggs and fish, the essentials,

The aphrodisiac squid.
My mouth sags,
The mouth of Christ
When my engine reaches the end of it.

The tattle of my
Gold joints, my way of turning
Bitches to ripples of silver
Rolls out a carpet, a hush.

And there is no end, no end of it.
I shall never grow old. New oysters
Shriek in the sea and I
Glitter like Fontainebleu

Gratified,
All the fall of water an eye
Over whose pool I tenderly
Lean and see me.





Last Words
Sylvia Plath

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already -- the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!
My mirror is clouding over --
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.
One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.
They stay, their little particular lusters
Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
When the soles of my feet grow cold,
The blue eye of my tortoise will comfort me.
Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots
Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.
They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart
Under my feet in a neat parcel.
I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,
And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.





--Cat

May 7 -- Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) 

Prolific American poet, essayist, playwright, political activist, and for several years at the request of FDR, the Librarian of Congress. He won numerous awards for his poems and plays, among them Pulitzer Prizes and an Academy Award.




An Eternity by Archibald MacLeish


There is no dusk to be, 
There is no dawn that was, 
Only there's now, and now, 
And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of 
Now in my heart, are now; 
Days that I dream will bloom 
White the peach bough.

Dying shall never be 
Now in the windy grass; 
Now under shooken leaves 
Death never was. 




Dr. Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell by Archibald MacLeish
                  

Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered
Figuring what anything is for:
Enough for her devotions that things are
And can be contemplated soon as gathered.

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered.

Why should she? Her religion is to tell
By rote her rosary of perfect answers.
Metaphysics she can leave to man:
She never wakes at night in heaven or hell

Staring at darkness. In her holy cell
There is no darkness ever: the pure candle
Burns, the beads drop briskly from her hand.

Who dares to offer Her the curled sea shell!
She will not touch it!--knows the world she sees
Is all the world there is! Her faith is perfect!

And still he offers the sea shell . . .

What surf
Of what far sea upon what unknown ground
Troubles forever with that asking sound?
What surge is this whose question never ceases? 

                           

       
Nocturne by Archibald MacLeish


The earth, still heavy and warm with afternoon,
Dazed by the moon:

The earth, tormented with the moon’s light,
Wandering in the night:

La, La, The moon is a lovely thing to see—
The moon is an agony.

Full moon, moon rise, the old old pain
Of brightness in dilated eyes,

The ache of still
Elbows leaning on the narrow sill,

Of motionless cold hands upon the wet
Marble of the parapet,

Of open eyelids of a child behind
The crooked glimmer of the windown blind,

Of sliding faint remindful squares
Across the lamplight on the rocking-chairs:

Why do we stand so late
Stiff fingers on the moonlit gat

Why do we stand
To watch so long the fall of moonlight on the sand?

What is it we cannot recall?
Tormented by the moon’s light
The earth turns maundering through the night. 




The Rock In The Sea by Archibald MacLeish
          
Think of our blindness where the water burned! 
Are we so certain that those wings, returned 
And turning, we had half discerned 
Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen 
The bird aloft there, did not mean?— 
Our hearts so seized upon the sign! 


Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine 
Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave 
Thundering in the water cave— 
Thunder in stone. And how we beached the skiff 
And climbed the coral of that iron cliff 
And found what only in our hearts we’d heard— 
The silver screaming of that one, white bird: 
The fabulous wings, the crimson beak 
That opened, red as blood, to shriek 
And clamor in that world of stone, 
No voice to answer but its own. 


What certainty, hidden in our hearts before, 
Found in the bird its metaphor? 


           
    
The End of the World by Archibald MacLeish

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all. 


-- Cat

February 29 -- Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was United States Poet Laureate on two separate occasions: from 1963 to 1964, and from 1988 to 1990. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus.



"I got the idea that you were supposed to be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times, but civilization has ended so many times during my brief term on earth that I got a little bored with the theme."  -- Howard Nemerov 



"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time." -- Howard Nemerov 
   


A Spell before Winter
   
After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. 




The Blue Swallows
   
Across the millstream below the bridge 
Seven blue swallows divide the air 
In shapes invisible and evanescent, 
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s 
Or memory’s power to keep them there. 

“History is where tensions were,” 
“Form is the diagram of forces.” 
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge, 
While gazing down upon those birds— 
How strange, to be above the birds!— 
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain 
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web, 
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs 
Dipped in invisible ink, writing… 

Poor mind, what would you have them write? 
Some cabalistic history 
Whose authorship you might ascribe 
listening do To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost, 
You’ve capitalized your Self enough. 
That villainous William of Occam 
Cut out the feet from under that dream 
Some seven centuries ago. 
It’s taken that long for the mind 
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see 
With opened eyes emptied of speech 
The real world where the spelling mind 
Imposes with its grammar book 
Unreal relations on the blue 
Swallows. Perhaps when you will have 
Fully awakened, I shall show you 
A new thing: even the water 
Flowing away beneath those birds 
Will fail to reflect their flying forms, 
And the eyes that see become as stones 
Whence never tears shall fall again. 

O swallows, swallows, poems are not 
The point. Finding again the world, 
That is the point, where loveliness 
Adorns intelligible things 
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun. 



Fugue by Howard Nemerov
                               
You see them vanish in their speeding cars, 
The many people hastening through the world,
And wonder what they would have done before
This time of time speed distance, random streams
Of molecules hastened by what rising heat?
Was there never a world where people just sat still?

Yet they might be all of them contemplatives
Of a timeless now, drivers and passengers
In the moving cars all facing to the front
Which is the future, which is destiny,
Which is desire and desire's end - 
What are they doing but just sitting still?

And still at speed they fly away, as still 
As the road paid out beneath them as it flows
Moment by moment into the mirrored past;
They spread in their wake the parading fields of food,
The windowless works where who is making what,
The grey towns where the wishes and the fears are done. 




The View From An Attic Window 
                                              
Among the high-branching, leafless boughs 
Above the roof-peaks of the town, 
Snowflakes unnumberably come down. 

I watched out of the attic window 
The laced sway of family trees, 
Intricate genealogies 

Whose strict, reserved gentility, 
Trembling, impossible to bow, 
Received the appalling fall of snow. 

All during Sunday afternoon, 
Not storming, but befittingly, 
Out of a still, grey, devout sky, 

The snowflakes fell, until all shapes 
Went under, and thickening, drunken lines 
Cobwebbed the sleep of solemn pines. 

Up in the attic, among many things 
Inherited and out of style, 
I cried, then fell asleep awhile, 

Waking at night now, as the snow- 
flakes from darkness to darkness go 
Past yellow lights in the street below. 

2 
I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful. 
And like a child I cried myself to sleep 
High in the head of the house, feeling the hull 
Beneath me pitch and roll among the steep 
Mountains and valleys of the many years 
That brought me to tears. 

Down in the cellar, furnace and washing machine, 
Pump, fuse-box, water heater, work their hearts 
Out at my life, which narrowly runs between 
Them and this cemetery of spare parts 
For discontinued men, whose hats and canes 
Are my rich remains. 

And women, their portraits and wedding gowns 
Stacked in the corners, brooding in wooden trunks; 

And children’s rattles, books about lions and clowns; 
And headless, hanging dresses swayed like drunks 
Whenever a living footstep shakes the floor; 
I mention no more; 

But what I thought today, that made me cry, 
Is this, that we live in two kinds of thing: 
The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky 
Their black patience, are one, and that branching 
Relation teaches how we endure and grow; 
The other is the snow, 

Falling in a white chaos from the sky, 
As many as the sands of all the seas, 
As all the men who died or who will die, 
As stars in heaven, as leaves of all the trees; 
As Abraham was promised of his seed; 
Generations bleed, 

Till I, high in the tower of my time 
Among familiar ruins, began to cry 
For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, 
Because all died, because I had to die. 
The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, 
And a child I slept. 




-- Cat

August 22 — Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker    August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967
American poet, author, critic, well known for her witty, satirical writings






                          
     A Very Short Song 

                                  
Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse. 





      Anecdote 

                                  
So silent I when Love was by
He yawned, and turned away;
But Sorrow clings to my apron-strings,
I have so much to say. 


  


     Ballade Of A Talked-Off Ear 


Daily I listen to wonder and woe,
Nightly I hearken to knave or to ace,
Telling me stories of lava and snow,
Delicate fables of ribbon and lace,
Tales of the quarry, the kill, the chase,
Longer than heaven and duller than hell-
Never you blame me, who cry my case:
"Poets alone should kiss and tell!"

Dumbly I hear what I never should know,
Gently I counsel of pride and of grace;
Into minutiae gayly they go,
Telling the name and the time and the place.
Cede them your silence and grant them space-
Who tenders an inch shall be raped of an ell!
Sympathy's ever the boaster's brace;
Poets alone should kiss and tell.

Why am I tithed what I never did owe?
Choked with vicarious saffron and mace?
Weary my lids, and my fingers are slow-
Gentlemen, damn you, you've halted my pace.
Only the lads of the cursed race,
Only the knights of the desolate spell,
May point me the lines the blood-drops trace-
Poets alone should kiss and tell.

L'ENVOI

Prince or commoner, tenor or bass,
Painter or plumber or never-do-well,
Do me a favor and shut your face
Poets alone should kiss and tell. 





     Chant For Dark Hours    

                               
Some men, some men
Cannot pass a
Book shop.
(Lady, make your mind up, and wait your life away.)


Some men, some men
Cannot pass a
Crap game.
(He said he'd come at moonrise, and here's another day!)


Some men, some men
Cannot pass a
Bar-room.
(Wait about, and hang about, and that's the way it goes.)


Some men, some men
Cannot pass a
Woman.
(Heaven never send me another one of those!)


Some men, some men
Cannot pass a
Golf course.
(Read a book, and sew a seam, and slumber if you can.)


Some men, some men
Cannot pass a
Haberdasher's.
(All your life you wait around for some damn man!) 





Charles Dickens

                                  
Who call him spurious and shoddy
Shall do it o'er my lifeless body.
I heartily invite such birds
To come outside and say those words! 





Epitaph


The first time I died, I walked my ways;
I followed the file of limping days.

I held me tall, with my head flung up,
But I dared not look on the new moon's cup.

I dared not look on the sweet young rain,
And between my ribs was a gleaming pain.

The next time I died, they laid me deep.
They spoke worn words to hallow my sleep.

They tossed me petals, they wreathed me fern,
They weighted me down with a marble urn.

And I lie here warm, and I lie here dry,
And watch the worms slip by, slip by. 


                              Dorothy Parker 


— Cat

May 25 – Raymond Carver

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. 

May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988 

Award-winning American short story writer and poet. [The first poem featured below is engraved on his tombstone.]





Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.



The Best Time Of The Day

Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours,
of course. And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love

these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.



The Cobweb

A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that's happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
a cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
and went inside. There was no wind. The sea
was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realizes,
I'll be gone from here.



This Morning  

This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk -- determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong -- duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back i didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.


  
  

— Cat

August 8 - Sarah Teasdale

[first posted on August 8, 2007]

Sara Teasdale August 8, 1884- January 29, 1933

American lyric poet, born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her delicate, personal poetry often deals with love, death, disillusionment, and also the beauties of the natural world. She ended her life by suicide at the age of 48.

Some of Sara Teasdale's poems:

Longing

I am not sorry for my soul
That it must go unsatisfied,
For it can live a thousand times,
Eternity is deep and wide.

I am not sorry for my soul,
But oh, my body that must go
Back to a little drift of dust
Without the joy it longed to know.


Immortal

So soon my body will have gone
Beyond the sound and sight of men,
And tho' it wakes and suffers now,
Its sleep will be unbroken then;
But oh, my frail immortal soul
That will not sleep forevermore,
A leaf borne onward by the blast,
A wave that never finds the shore.


If Death Is Kind

Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.

We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.


Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things;
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell;
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And, for the Spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Give all you have for loveliness;
Buy it, and never count the cost!
For one white, singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost;
And for a breath of ecstasy,
Give all you have been, or could be.


At Midnight

Now at last I have come to see what life is,
Nothing is ever ended, everything only begun,
And the brave victories that seem so splendid
Are never really won.

Even love that I built my spirit's house for,
Comes like a brooding and a baffled guest,
And music and men's praise and even laughter
Are not so good as rest.


-- Cat