Limes with Orange

What I'm reading, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling... all one and the same thing:

Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath, 1953

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
~

I thought that I could not be hurt
Sylvia Plath, 1947

I thought that I could not be hurt
I thought that I must surely be
Impervious to suffering—
Immune to mental pain
or agony.

My world was warm with April sun
My thoughts were spangled green and gold
My soul filled up with joy, yet felt
The sharp sweet pain that only joy
Can hold.

My spirit soared above the gulls
That, swooping breathlessly so high
O'erhead now seemed to brush their whir-
ring wings against the blue roof of
the sky.

(How frail the human heart must be—
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing—
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep
or sing)

Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
And darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
Where careless hands had reached out to
Destroy

My silver web of happiness
the hands then stopped in wonderment,
For, loving me, they wept to see
The tattered ruins of my firma-
ment.

(How frail the human heart must be—
a mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing
or weep.)
~

Years
Sylvia Plath, 1962

They enter as animals from the outer
Space of holly where spikes
Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
But greenness, darkness so pure
They freeze and are.

O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

What I love is
The piston in motion...
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
There merciless churn.

And you, great Stasis...
What is so great in that!
Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?
It is a Christus,
The awful
God-bit in him
Dying to fly and be done with it?
The blood berries are themselves, they are very still.

The hooves will not have it,
In blue distance the pistons hiss.
~

For more info on Sylvia Plath, check out PlathOnline (with its very complete Poetry page) or the inevitable Wikipedia article.