I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am. - Sylvia Plath

The woman is perfected
Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

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 or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it 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 toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.