A Secret

A secret! A secret!
How superior.
You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman,
Holding up one palm -

A difference between us?
I have one eye, you have two.
The secret is stamped on you,
Faint, undulant watermark.

Will it show in the black detector?
Will it come out
Wavery, indelible, true
Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery.

The Moroccan hippopotamus?
They stare from a square, stiff, stiff frill.
They are for export,
One a fool, the other a fool.

A secret...An extra amber
Brandy finger
Roosting and cooing "You, you"
Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys.

Sylvia Plath in Collected Poems

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful -
The eye of a little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles the moon.
I see her back, and reflect is faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises towards her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath in Collected Poems