Elm by Sylvia Plath

for Ruth Fainlight


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 you 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 gallup 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, the 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.