Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball, <br />This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear. <br />Here's yesterday, last year --- <br />Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast <br />Windless threadwork of a tapestry. <br /> <br />Flick the glass with your fingernail: <br />It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir <br />Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer. <br />The inhabitants are light as cork, <br />Every one of them permanently busy. <br /> <br />At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file. <br />Never trespassing in bad temper: <br />Stalling in midair, <br />Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses. <br />Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy <br /> <br />As Victorian cushions. This family <br />Of valentine faces might please a collector: <br />They ring true, like good china. <br /> <br />Elsewhere the landscape is more frank. <br />The light falls without letup, blindingly. <br /> <br />A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle <br />About a bald hospital saucer. <br />It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper <br />And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg. <br />She lives quietly <br /> <br />With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle, <br />The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture <br />She has one too many dimensions to enter. <br />Grief and anger, exorcised, <br />Leave her alone now. <br /> <br />The future is a grey seagull <br />Tattling in its cat-voice of departure. <br />Age and terror, like nurses, attend her, <br />And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold, <br />Crawls up out of the sea. <br /> <br /> <br />Submitted by Venus<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-life/
