Sylvia Plath

Face Lift

You bring me good news from the clinic,

Whipping   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 with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.

Then 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 dewIapped 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

Sylvia Plath

 Poems  selected by Ted Hughes

Faber Poetry

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