Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

 

CROSSING THE WATER 

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.

Where do the black trees go that drink here?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.

Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:

They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.

The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.

A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.

Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?

This is the silence of astounded souls.

Sylvia Plath.

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

THE SLEEPERS

No map traces the street

Where those two sleepers are.

We have lost track of it.

They lie as if under water

In a blue, unchanging light,

The French window ajar

Curtained with yellow lace.

Through the narrow crack

Odors of wet earth rise.

The snail leaves a silver track;

Dark thickets hedge the house.

We take a backward look.

Among petals pale as death

And leaves steadfast in shape

They sleep on, mouth to mouth.

A white mist is going up.

The small green nostrils breathe,

And they turn in their sleep.

Ousted from that warm bed

We are a dream they dream.

Their eyelids keep up the shade.

No harm can come to them.

We cast our skins and slide

Into another time.

Silvia Plath.

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

                           MIRROR

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful ‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Silvia Plath.

Y EL ÓBOLO BAJO LA LENGUA

          THE FEARFUL

This man makes a pseudonym

And crawls behind it like a worm.

This woman on the telephone

Says she is a man, not a woman.

The mask increases, eats the worm,

Stripes for mouth and eyes and nose,

The voice of the woman hollows—

More and more like a dead one,

Worms in the glottal stops.

She hates

The thought of a baby—

Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty—

She would rather be dead than fat,

Dead and perfect, like Nefertit,

Hearing the fierce mask magnify

The silver limbo of each eye

Where the child can never swim,

Where there is only him and him.

                                  Sylvia Plath.