Tulips|Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands  

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions 

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses   

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff   

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another

So it is impossible to tell how many there are

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox 

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat   

stubbornly hanging on to my name and address

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley   

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books   

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them   

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe   

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds

They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow   

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself 

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen

Before they came the air was calm enough

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river   

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine

They concentrate my attention, that was happy   

Playing and resting without committing itself

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea

And comes from a country far away as health