The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole . . .
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.
Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments—the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.
He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue . . .
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.
His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.
Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.
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Comments
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"periods of stars," is very clever, and "peepholes," captures the image so well, as if the sky has little holes pinpricked into the skin and the little stareyes peer through.
This made me think of when we have something on our mind, maybe the inevitable passing of time, and it takes our sleep away from us, plaguing us with thoughts we wish not to have.
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My goodness, this woman really had an outstanding talent!...This poem captures exactly the feeling of restlesness that lurks and gnaws when you are insommniac, since I've been going trhough a very bad sore throat lately, the last four nights have been exactly this, word by word...a peculiar coincidence to find out a poem that matches exactly what has happened to me on recent days...The whole poem is magnificent but the last lines stands out very much to me, "Are riding to wrok in rows, as if recently brainwashed".
"Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions"
This is also very graphic and descriptive on that sensation of how the eyes seem to feel as if wanting to explode, with endless streams of sand in the back of them, hugging and tossing a pillow to find a dent that might help you to finally get some rest...gorgeous poem for describing afterhours beyond dusk ~ Juan Anguas -
A very well written piece.
This is one of my favorite poems. Sylvia plath has been one of my favorite poets for sometime now. It would have been amazing to see what she would have accomplished had she lived.
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