The Other
You come in late, wiping your lips.
What did I leave untouched on the
doorstep---
White Nike,
Streaming between my walls?
Smilingly,
blue lightning
Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.
The
police love you, you confess everything.
Bright hair, shoe-black, old
plastic,
Is my life so intriguing?
Is it for this you widen your
eye-rings?
Is it for this the air motes depart?
They rae not air
motes, they are corpuscles.
Open your handbag. What is that bad
smell?
It is your knitting, busily
Hooking itself to itself,
It is
your sticky candies.
I have your head on my wall.
Navel cords,
blue-red and lucent,
Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I
ride.
O moon-glow, o sick one,
The stolen horses, the
fornications
Circle a womb of marble.
Where are you going
That you
suck breath like mileage?
Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream.
Cold
glass, how you insert yourself
Between myself and myself.
I scratch
like a cat.
The blood that runs is dark fruit---
An effect, a
cosmetic.
You smile.
No, it is not fatal.
- Sylvia Plath