Elm

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are your hooves: it has gone off, like horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf.
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fuit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
May red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires

Now I break up in peices that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery
How your bad dreams possess and endow me

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrifies by this dark thing
That sleeps in me
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches-

Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.




~ Sylvia Plath