The Face Lift
By Sylvia Plath
You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault
Boomed wild bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
The mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.
They've changed all that. Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard...
I don't know a thing.
For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.
Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror ---
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or whither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.

The Female Author
By Sylvia Plath
All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world:
Favored (while suddenly the rains begin
Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled
And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin.
Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms
Where polished higboys whisper creaking curses
And hothouse roses shed immortal blooms.
The garnets on her fingers twinkle quick
And blood reflects across the manuscript;
She muses on the odor, sweet and sick,
Of festering gardenias in a crypt,
And lost in subtle metaphor, retreats
From gray child faces crying in the streets.
Cinderella
By Sylvia Plath
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

Lady Lazarus
By Sylvia Plath
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr god, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Bitter Strawberries
By Sylvia Plath
All morning in the strawberry field
They talked about the Russians.
Squatted down between the rows
We listened.
We heard the head woman say,
'Bomb them off the map.'
Horseflies buzzed, paused and stung.
And the taste of strawberries
Turned thick and sour.
Mary said slowly, 'I've got a fella
Old enough to go.
If anything should happen...'
The sky was high and blue.
Two children laughed at tag
In the tall grass,
Leaping awkward and long-legged
Across the rutted road.
The fields were full of bronzed young men
Hoeing lettuce, weeding celery.
'The draft is passed,' the woman said.
'We ought to have bombed them long ago.'
'Don't,' pleaded the little girl
With blond braids.
Her blue eyes swam with vague terror.
She added petishly, 'I can't see why
You're always talking this way...'
'Oh, stop worrying, Nelda,'
Snapped the woman sharply.
She stood up, a thin commanding figure
In faded dungarees.
Businesslike she asked us, 'How many quarts?'
She recorded the total in her notebook,
And we all turned back to picking.
Kneeling over the rows,
We reached among the leaves
With quick practiced hands,
Cupping the berry protectively before
Snapping off the stem
Between thumb and forefinger.

The Filling Station
By Elizabeth Bishop
Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station, oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms, and several quick and saucy and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station), all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it a set of crushed and grease- impregnated wickerwork; on the wicker sofa a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide the only note of color— of certain color. They lie upon a big dim doily draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch with marguerites, I think, and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant, or oils it, maybe. Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say:
ESSO
—
SO
—
SO
—
SO to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

One Art
By Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write it!) like disaster.

The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop
Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”
Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

A Miracle for Breakfast
At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee, waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb that was going to be served from a certain balcony
--like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.
The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee would be very hot, seeing that the sun was not going to warm us; and that the crumb would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.
He stood for a minute alone on the balcony looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle, consisting of one lone cup of coffee and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb, his head, so to speak, in the clouds--along with the sun.
Was the man crazy? What under the sun was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb, which some flicked scornfully into the river, and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.
I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony added by birds, who nest along the river,
--I saw it with one eye close to the crumb-- and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb my mansion, made for me by a miracle, through ages, by insects, birds, and the river working the stone. Every day, in the sun, at breakfast time I sit on my balcony with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.
We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.

Anaphora
By Elizabeth Bishop
Each day with so much ceremony begins, with birds, with bells, with whistles from a factory; such white-gold skies our eyes first open on, such brilliant walls that for a moment we wonder
'Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature we must have missed? ' Oh promptly he appears and takes his earthly nature
instantly, instantly falls
victim of long intrigue,
assuming memory and mortal
mortal fatigue.
More slowly falling into sight and showering into stippled faces, darkening, condensing all his light; in spite of all the dreaming squandered upon him with that look, suffers our uses and abuses, sinks through the drift of bodies, sinks through the drift of classes to evening to the beggar in the park who, weary, without lamp or book
prepares stupendous studies:
the fiery event
of every day in endless
endless assent.
Conversation
By Elizabeth Bishop
The tumult in the heart keeps asking questions.
And then it stops and undertakes to answer in the same tone of voice.
No one could tell the difference.
Uninnocent, these conversations start, and then engage the senses, only half-meaning to.
And then there is no choice, and then there is no sense; until a name and all its connotation are the same.

Is/Not
By Margaret Atwood
Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveller
Give up this medical concern, buttoned, attentive, permit yourself anger and permit me mine which needs neither your approval nor your suprise which does not need to be made legal which is not against a disease but agaist you, which does not need to be understood or washed or cauterized, which needs instead to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.
Spelling
By Margaret Atwood
My daughter plays on the floor with plastic letters, red, blue & hard yellow, learning how to spell, spelling, how to make spells.
I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, closed themselves in rooms, drew the curtains so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem, a poem is not a child. there is no either/or.
However.
I return to the story of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied together by the enemy so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch, her mouth covered by leather to strangle words.
A word after a word after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away from the hot bones, at the point where the rock breaks open and darkness flows out of it like blood, at the melting point of granite when the bones know they are hollow & the word splits & doubles & speaks the truth & the body itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun, your own name first, your first naming, your first name, your first word.

In the Secular Night
By Margaret Atwood
In the secular night you wander around alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.
Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
Siren Song
By Margaret Atwood
This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see beached skulls the song nobody knows because anyone who had heard it is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here squatting on this island looking picturesque and mythical with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable.
I will tell the secret to you, to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can, you are unique at last. Alas it is a boring song but it works every time.

A Sad Child
By Margaret Atwood
You're sad because you're sad.
It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical.
Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep.
Well, all children are sad but some get over it.
Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet.
Take up dancing to forget.
Forget what?
Your sadness, your shadow, whatever it was that was done to you the day of the lawn party when you came inside flushed with the sun, your mouth sulky with sugar, in your new dress with the ribbon and the ice-cream smear, and said to yourself in the bathroom,
I am not the favorite child.
My darling, when it comes right down to it and the light fails and the fog rolls in and you're trapped in your overturned body under a blanket or burning car, and the red flame is seeping out of you and igniting the tarmac beside you head or else the floor, or else the pillow, none of us is; or else we all are.

F E A R O F S N A K E S
Lorna Crozier
The snake can separate itself from its shadow, move on ribbons of light, taste the air, the morning and the evening, the darkness at the heart of things. I remember when my fear of snakes left for good, it fell behind me like an old skin. In Swift Current the boys found a huge snake and chased me down the alleys, Larry Moen carrying it like a green torch, the others yelling, Drop it down her back , my terror of it sliding in the runnell of my spine (Larry, the one who touched the inside of my legs on the swing, an older boy we knew we shouldn't get close to with our little dresses, our soft skin), my brother saying Let her go , and I crouched behind the caraganas, watched Larry nail the snake to a telephone pole.
It twisted on twin points of light, unable to crawl out of its pain, its mouth opening, the red tongue tasting its own terror, I loved it then, that snake. The boys standing there with their stupid hands dangling from their wrists, the beautiful green mouth opening, a terrible dark O no one could hear.
T H E B A D C H I L D
Lorna Crozier
One teacher made the bad child crawl under her desk and stay there till recess. It seems strangely sexual to him now, the dark, the musky smell of her.
Another made the bad child stand in a waste-paper basket, pushed wet gum on the end of his nose.
He stood there till he fainted, keeled over with a crash. One teacher hit the bad child with the pointing stick when she spelled a word wrong in the spelling bee.
Another made the bad child rise, show the class she had wet herself, a yellow pool around her desk.
One teacher made the bad child eat his words till he gagged on paper, mouth blue from ink.
One touched the child, so very bad, where he wasn't supposed to, another broke the bad child's toes when she wouldn't stop skipping, one cut off the bad child's fingers because he drummed and drummed his desk.
One chopped the bad child into bits.
We watched her bury the body beneath the monkey bars where every winter on the cold metal bad children leave their tongues.

M Y S I S T E R ' S E Y E S
Lorna Crozier
My sister who never followed me was awkward, yet a graceful lovely thing. Armless, her hands sprouted from her shoulderblades, fingers splayed into fins.
Round hard buds blunted legs that never grew yet in the salty sea she flipped and somersaulted, eyes wide open and green as light inside a leaf.
Even then I knew
I'd forget most things but not my sister or the underwater cave where we swam to sleep.
My fingers, each distinct and whole, no flap of skin between, made trails on the soft enfolding walls like those a snail will leave as it eats its way across the algae-skin of stone.
Guided by the green of her amazing eyes bone by bone I drew our mother's face so I would know someone when I had to leave my sister and learn with awkward grace to love the world.
O N I O N S
Lorna Crozier
The onion loves the onion.
It hugs its many layers, saying, O, O, O, each vowel smaller than the last.
Some say it has no heart.
It doesn't need one.
It surrounds itself, feels whole. Primordial.
First among vegetables.
If Eve had bitten it instead of the apple, how different
Paradise.

Lesson in Perspective
By Lorna Crozier
The cat creates world with a paw’s touch, with a stroke of whiskers intricate parallels like a lesson in perspective where no lines meet.
The colours are those a cat can see, the many greys and sepias of shade, the sun’s glossolalia on blades of grass quivering in the slightest breeze.
After warbler and nuthatch after thrush, chickadee, and finsh, the cat makes mouse, bumblebee, and spider, then the dragonfly that beats on the rilled roof of his mouth, a word with wings.
The cat makes words with fangs, too, with hooves, fins, and tusks.
At dusk he says a word that moves so lightly across the mind it must be small, nectar-sipping moth, feet of such delicate design it walks on petals and leaves no bruise. http://prezi.com/tskhjo9pykkp/poetry/