I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them–
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

The Death of Myth-Making

by Sylvia Plath

Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,

To grind our knives and scissors:

Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense,

One courting doctors of all sorts,

One, housewives and shopkeepers.

The trees are lopped, the poodles trim,

The laborer’s nails pared level

Since those two civil servants set

Their whetstone to the blunted edge

And minced the muddling devil

Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood

Scared mothers to miscarry,

Drove the dogs to cringe and whine

And turned the farmboy’s temper wolfish,

The housewife’s, desultory.

Death & Co.

Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now——
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled¸ like Blake's.
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark——
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that
His hair long and plausive
Bastard
Masturbating a glitter
He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

Somebody's done for.

The Dead

Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,
 Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,
 Dead men render love and war no heed,
 Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.
 
 No spiritual Caesars are these dead;
 They want no proud paternal kingdom come;
 And when at last they blunder into bed
 World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.
 
 Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,
 These bone shanks will not wake immaculate
 To trumpet-toppling dawn of doomstruck day : 
 They loll forever in colossal sleep;
 Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up
 From their fond, final, infamous decay.

An Appearance