You bring me good news from the clinic, <br />Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white <br />Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right. <br />When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist <br />Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask. The nauseous vault <br />Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons. <br />Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin. <br />O I was sick. <br /> <br />They've changed all that. Traveling <br />Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift, <br />Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous, <br />I roll to an anteroom where a kind man <br />Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious <br />Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two, <br />Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . . <br />I don't know a thing. <br /> <br />For five days I lie in secret, <br />Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow. <br />Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country. <br />Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper. <br />When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty, <br />Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers <br />Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle; <br />I hadn't a cat yet. <br /> <br />Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady <br />I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror— <br />Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg. <br />They've trapped her in some laboratory jar. <br />Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years, <br />Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair. <br />Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze, <br />Pink and smooth as a baby.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/face-lift/
