ElmBY SYLVIA PLATHI know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:...

Elm
BY SYLVIA PLATH
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 its hooves: it has gone off, like a 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 fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces 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 radiance 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 terrified 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 kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.