The yew's black fingers wag: <br />Cold clouds go over. <br />So the deaf and dumb <br />Signal the blind, and are ignored. <br /> <br />I like black statements. <br />The featurelessness of that cloud, now! <br />White as an eye all over! <br />The eye of the blind pianist <br /> <br />At my table on the ship. <br />He felt for his food. <br />His fingers had the noses of weasels. <br />I couldn't stop looking. <br /> <br />He could hear Beethoven: <br />Black yew, white cloud, <br />The horrific complications. <br />Finger-traps—a tumult of keys. <br /> <br />Empty and silly as plates, <br />So the blind smile. <br />I envy big noises, <br />The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge. <br />Deafness is something else. <br />Such a dark funnel, my father! <br />I see your voice <br />Black and leafy, as in my childhood. <br /> <br />A yew hedge of orders, <br />Gothic and barbarous, pure German. <br />Dead men cry from it. <br />I am guilty of nothing. <br /> <br />The yew my Christ, then. <br />Is it not as tortured? <br />And you, during the Great War <br />In the California delicatessen <br /> <br />Lopping off the sausages! <br />They colour my sleep, <br />Red, mottled, like cut necks. <br />There was a silence! <br /> <br />Great silence of another order. <br />I was seven, I knew nothing. <br />The world occurred. <br />You had one leg, and a Prussian mind. <br /> <br />Now similar clouds <br />Are spreading their vacuous sheets. <br />Do you say nothing? <br />I am lame in the memory. <br /> <br />I remember a blue eye, <br />A briefcase of tangerines. <br />This was a man, then! <br />Death opened, like a black tree, blackly. <br /> <br />I survive the while, <br />Arranging my morning. <br />These are my fingers, this my baby. <br />The clouds are a marriage of dress, of that pallor.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/little-fugue-2/
