Plath: Poems

O love, how did you get here? --Nick and the Candlestick

There is more than one good way to drown.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)

The storerooms are full of hearts. This is the city of spare parts.

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

Your shelled bed I remember. Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.

I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off.

the cat unsheathes its claws the world turns

The words in his book wormed off the pages. Everything glittered like blank paper.

You inherit white heather, a bee's wing, Two suicides, the family wolves, Hours of blankness.

Through the mind like an oyster labors on and on, / A grain of sand is all we have