BY SYLVIA PLATH
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Protected from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard
Pehaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece pf 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.
Scaling little ladder with glue pot and pails of Lysol
I crawk like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a chill of black cypress.
Your fluted bons and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Ninghts, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of you tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.