The smile of the snow is white

Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick" spliced with "Wintering"

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters--
Sir So-and-so's gin.

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs...

This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Chinese yellow on appalling objects--
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish -
Christ! they are panes of ice,

To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going, The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady

(They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.)

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.

Winter is for women--
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,

The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.