I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root; <br />It is what you fear. <br />I do not fear it: I have been there. <br /> <br />Is it the sea you hear in me, <br />Its dissatisfactions? <br />Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? <br /> <br />Love is a shadow. <br />How you lie and cry after it. <br />Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. <br /> <br />All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously, <br />Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, <br />Echoing, echoing. <br /> <br />Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? <br />This is rain now, the big hush. <br />And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic. <br /> <br />I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. <br />Scorched to the root <br />My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires. <br /> <br />Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. <br />A wind of such violence <br />Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. <br /> <br />The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me <br />Cruelly, being barren. <br />Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. <br /> <br />I let her go. I let her go <br />Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. <br />How your bad dreams possess and endow me. <br /> <br />I am inhabited by a cry. <br />Nightly it flaps out <br />Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. <br /> <br />I am terrified by this dark thing <br />That sleeps in me; <br />All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. <br /> <br />Clouds pass and disperse. <br />Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? <br />Is it for such I agitate my heart? <br /> <br />I am incapable of more knowledge. <br />What is this, this face <br />So murderous in its strangle of branches?-- <br /> <br />Its snaky acids kiss. <br />It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults <br />That kill, that kill, that kill.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/elm/
