Full Fathom Five

by Sylvia Plath

Old man, you surface seldom.

Then you come in with the tide's

coming

When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard,

far-flung,

A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves

Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves

Of your spread hair, in which wrin-

kling skeins

Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of orgins

Unimaginable. You float near

As kneeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear

Of, not fathomed. All obscurity

Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I

Cannot look much but your form

suffers

Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors

Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.

The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me

To half-believe: your reappearance

Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines

Of your grained face shed time in

runnels:

Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels

Of the ocean. Such sage humor

and

Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-

Work of the earth and the sky's

ridgepole.

Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle

To root deep among knuckles, shin-

bones,

Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once

Seen by any man who kept his head,

You defy questions;

You defy godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom's border

Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.

Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water.

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