Two Campers in Cloud Country

Two Campers in Cloud Country
(Rock Lake, Canada)

In this country there is neither measure nor balance

To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,

The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds.

No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention,

No word make them carry water or fire the kindling

Like local trolls in the spell of a superior being.

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation

Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;

Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses.

It took three days driving north to find a cloud

The polite skies over Boston couldn't possibly accommodate.

Here on the last frontier of the big, brash spirit

The horizons are too far off to be chummy as uncles;

The colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance.

Each day concludes in a huge splurge of vermilions

And night arrives in one gigantic step.

It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.

These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.

In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.

Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;

The pines bolt our voices up in their lightest sighs.

Around our tent the old simplicities sough

Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.

We'll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn.

-- Sylvia Plath

The Net-Menders

Halfway up from the little harbor of sardine boats,

Halfway down from grooves where the thin, bitter almond pips

Fatten in green-pocked pods, the three net-menders sit out,

Dressed in black, everybody in mourning for someone.

They set their stout chairs back to the road and face the dark

Dominoes of their doorways.

                                                Sun grains their crow-colors,

Purples the fig in the leaf's shadow, turns the dust pink.

On the road named for Tomas Ortunio, mica

Winks like money under the ringed toes of the chickens.

The houses are white as sea-salt goats lick from the rocks.

While their fingers work with the coarse mesh and the fine

Their eyes revolve the whole town like a blue and green ball.

Nobody dies or is born without their knowing it.

They talk of bride-lace, of lovers as spunky as gamecocks.

The moon leans, a stone madonna, over the lead sea

And the iron hills that enclose them. Earthen fingers

Twist old words into the web-threads:

                                                                Tonight may the fish

Be a harvest of silver in the nets, and the lamps

Of our husbands and sons move sure among the low stars.

-- Sylvia Plath

A Winter Ship

At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of.
Red and orange barges list and blister

Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy,

And apparently indestructible.

The sea pulses under a skin of oil.

A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole,

Riding the tide of the wind, steady

As wood and formal, in a jacket of ashes,

The whole flat harbor anchored in

The round of his yellow eye-button.

A blimp swims up like a fay-moon or tin

Cigar over his rink of fished.

The prospect is dull as an old etching.

They are unloading three barrels of little crabs.

The pie pilings seem about to collapse

And with them that rickety edifice

Of warehouses, derricks, smokestacks and bridges

In the distance. All around us the water slips

And gossips in its loose vernacular,

Ferrying the smells of dead cod and tar.

Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes --

A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers.

Even our shadows are blue with cold.

We wanted to see the sun come up

And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,

Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost,

Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay

Encased in a glassy pellicle.

The sun will diminish it soon enough:

Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.

-- Sylvia Plath

Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows

There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air

Stilled, silvered as water in a glass

Nothing is big or far.

The small shrew chitters from its wilderness

Of grassheads and is heard.

Each thumb-size bird

Flits nimble-winged in thickets, and of good color.

Cloudwrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over

The bland Granta double their white and green

World under the sheer water

And ride that flux at anchor, upside down.

The punter sinks his pole.

In Byron's pool

Cat-tails part where the tame cygnets steer.

It is a country on a nursery plate.

Spotted crows revolve their jaws and crop

Red clover or gnaw beetroot

Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup.

Hedging meadows of benign

Arcadian green

The blood-berried hawthorn hides its spines with white.

Droll, vegetarian, the water rat

Saws down a reed and swims from his limber grove,

While the students stroll or sit,

Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love --

Black-gowned, but unaware

How in such mild air

The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.

-- Sylvia Plath

Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers

I walked the unwalked garden of rose-beds
In the public park; at home felt the want

Of a single rose present to imagine

The garden's remainder in full paint.

The stone lion-head set in the wall

Let drop its spittle of sluggish green

Into the stone basin. I snipped

An orange bud, pocketed it. When

It has opened its orange in my vase,

Retrogressed to blowze, I next chose ref;

Argued my conscience clear which robbed

The park of less red than withering did.

Musk satisfied my nose, red by eye,

The petals' nap my fingertips:

I considered the poetry I rescued

From blind air, from complete eclipse.

Yet today, a yellow bud in my hand,

I stalled at sudden noisy crashes

From the laurel thicket. No one approached.

A spasm took the rhododendron bushes:

Three girls, engrossed, were wrenching full clusters

Of cerise and pink from the rhododendron,

Mountaining them on spread newspaper.

They brassily picked, slowed by no chagrin,

And wouldn't pause for my straight look.

But gave me pause, my rose a charge,

Whether nicety stood confounded by love,

Or petty thievery by large.

-- Sylvia Plath

The simplified orderings of sky-lorded perspectives

Above the Oxbow

Here in this valley of discreet academies
We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks

To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock,

Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest.

Still, they're our best mustering of height: by

Comparison with the sunken silver-grizzled

Back of the Connecticut, the river-level

Flats of Hadley farms, they're lofty enough

Elevations to be called something more than hills.

Green, wholly green, they stand their knobby spine

Against our sky: they are what we look southward to

Up Pleasant Street at Main. Poising their shapes

Between the snuff and red tar-paper apartments,

They mound a summer coolness in our view.

To people who live in the bottom of valleys

A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks

To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic

In going up for the coming down if the post

We start at's the same post we finish by,

But it's the clear conversion at the top can hold

Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful

Wish for even ground, and it's the last cliff

Ledge will dislodge our cramped concept of space, unwall

Horizons beyond vision, spill vision

After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye

To full capacity. We climb in hopes

Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,

Blinded by green, under a green-grained sky

Into the blue. Tops define themselves as places

Where nothing higher's to be looked to. Downward looks

Follow the black arrow-backs of swifts on their track

Of the air eddies' loop and arc through air's at rest

To us, since we see no leaf edge stir high

Here on a mount overlaid with leaves. The paint-peeled

Hundred-year-old hotel sustains its ramshackle

Four-way veranda, view-keeping above

The fallen timbers of its once remarkable

Funicular railway, witness to gone

Time, and to graces gone with the time. A state view-

Keeper collects half-dollars for the slopes

Of state scenery, sells soda, shows off viewpoints.

A ruddy skylight paints the gray oxbow

And paints the river's pale circumfluent stillness

As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux

Of the desultory currents -- all that unique

Stipple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost

In the simplified orderings of sky-

Lorded perspectives. Maplike, the far fields are ruled

By correct green lines and no seedy free-for-all

Of asparagus heads. Cars run their suave

Colored beads on the strung roads, and the people stroll

Straightforwardly across the springing green.

All's peace and discipline down there. Till lately we

Lived under the shadow of hot rooftops

And never saw how coolly we might move. For once

A high hush quietens the crickets' cry.

-- Sylvia Plath

Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker

They called the place Lookout Farm.

                                                            Back then, the sun

Didn't go down in such a hurry. How it

Lit things, that lamp of the Possible!

                                                           Wet yet

Lay over the leaves like a clear cellophane,

A pane of dragonfly wing, when they left me

With a hundred bushel baskets on the edge

Of the spinach patch.

                                    Bunch after bunch of green

Upstanding spinach-tips wedged in a circle --

Layer on layer, and you had a basket

Irreproachable as any lettuce head,

Pure leafage. A hundred baskets by day's end.

Sun and sky mirrored the green of the spinach.

In the tin paul shaded by yellow paper

Well-water kept cool at the start of the rows.

The water had an iron taste, and the air,

Even, a tang of metal.

                                    Day in, day out,

I bent over the plants in my leather-kneed

Dungarees, proud as a lady in a sea

Of prize roses, culling the fullest florets;

My world pyramided with laden baskets.

I'd only set one foot in wilderness --

A whole sea of spinach-heads leaned to my hand.

-- Sylvia Plath

Poems, Potatoes

The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line

Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous

In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes,

Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,

Given an inch. Not that they're gross (although

Afterthought often would have them alter

To delicacy, to poise) but that they

Shortchange me continuously: whether

More or other, they still dissatisfy.

Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato

Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly

Superior page; the blunt stone also.

-- Sylvia Plath

Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies

Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies

A Sestina for the Douanier

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you

Came to be lying on this baroque couch

Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye

Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,

Set in an intricate wilderness of green

Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lilies

Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies,

It seems the consistent critics wanted you

To choose between your world of jungle green

And the fashionable monde of the red couch

With its prim bric-a-brac, without a moon

To turn you luminous, without the eye

Of tigers to be stilled by your dark eye

And body whiter than its frill of lilies:

They'd have had yellow silk screening the moon,

Leaves and lilies flattened to paper behind you

Or, at most, to a mille-fleurs tapestry. But the couch

Stood stubborn in its jungle: red against green,

Red against fifty variants of green,

The couch glared out at the prosaic eye.

So Roussau, to explain why the red couch

Persisted in the picture with the lilies,

Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,

And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon

On a red velvet couch within your green-

Tessellated boudoir. Hearing flutes, you

Dreamed yourself away in the moon's eye

To a beryl jungle, and dreamed that bright moon-lilies

Nodded their petaled heads around your couch.

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch

Accompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon

And the snakecharmer's song and the gigantic lilies,

Marvelingly numbered the many shades of green.

But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye

So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,

Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch

To feed his eye with red: such red! under the moon,

In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!

-- Sylvia Plath

Here is Rousseau's painting, The Dream. 

How best beauty's born of hardihood

Mayflower

Throughout black winter the red haws withstood
Assault of snow-flawed winds from the dour skies

And, bright as blood-drops, proved no brave branch dies

If root's firm-fixed and resolution good.

Now, as green sap ascends the steepled wood,

Each hedge with such white bloom astounds our eyes

As sprang from Joseph's rod, and testifies

How best beauty's born of hardihood.

So when staunch island stock chose forfeiture

Of the homeland hearth to plough their pilgrim way

Across Atlantic furrows, dark, unsure --

Remembering the white, triumphant spray

On hawthorn boughs, with goodwill to endure

They named their ship after the flower of May.

-- Sylvia Plath

Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident

To set the sight on fire

In my eye, nor seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,

Occasionally, some backtalk

From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:

A certain minor light may still

Leap incandescent

Out of a kitchen table or chair

As if a celestial burning took

Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --

Thus hallowing an interval

Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,

One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

Wary (for it could happen

Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,

Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare

Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine

As to seize my senses, haul

My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality. With luck,

Trekking stubborn through this season

Of fatigue, I shall

Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic

Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,

The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.

-- Sylvia Plath

Prospect

Among orange-tile rooftops

    and chimney pots

the fen fog slips,

    gray as rats,

while on spotted branch

    of the sycamore

two black rooks hunch

    and darkly glare,

watching for night

    with absinthe eye

cocked on the lone, late,

    passer-by.

-- Sylvia Plath

Southern Sunrise

Color of lemon, mango, peach,

These storybook villas

Still dream behind

Shutters, their balconies

Fine as hand-

Made lace, or a leaf-and-flower pen sketch.

Tilting with the winds,

On arrowy stems,

Pineapple-barked,

A green crescent of palms

Sends up its forked

Firework of fronds.

A quartz-clear dawn

Inch by bright inch

Gilds all our Avenue,

And out of the blue drench

Of Angels' Bay

Rises the round red watermelon sun.

-- Sylvia Plath

Fiesta Melons

In Benidorm there are melons,
Whole donkey-carts full

Of innumerable melons,

Ovals and balls,

Bright green and thumpable

Laced over with stripes

Of turtle-dark green.

Choose an egg-shape, a world-shape,

Bowl one homeward to taste

In the whitehot noon:

Cream-smooth honeydews,

Pink-pulped whoppers,

Bump-rinded cantaloupes

With orange cores.

Each wedge wears a studding

Of blanched seeds or black seeds

To strew like confetti

Under the feet of

This market of melon-eating

Fiesta-goers.

-- Sylvia Plath

The sky leans on me

Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,

Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,

And their fine lines singe

The air to orange

Before the distances they pin evaporate,

Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.

But they only dissolve and dissolve

Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

Pours by like destiny, bending

Everything in one direction.

I can feel it trying

To funnel my heat away.

If I pay the roots of the heather

Too close attention, they will invite me

To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,

Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

Gray as the weather.

The black slots of their pupil take me in.

It is like being mailed into space,

A thin, silly message.

They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,

All wig curls and yellow teeth

And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water

Limpid as the solitudes

That flee through my fingers.

Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;

Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.

Of people and the air only

Remembers a few odd syllables.

It rehearses them moaningly:

Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

Among all horizontals.

The grass is beating its head distractedly.

It is too delicate

For a life in such company;

Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow

And black as purses, the house lights

Gleam like small change.

-- Sylvia Plath