Under Stones

'I am terrified of this dark thing
 That sleeps in me
 All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.'
                                             -Sylvia Plath

(1)

What would it take to
Tap into me, The World ---
A great Mother-Tree.

For I am sunk beneath stones
An infiltration of what you
Cannot see ---
I am at this very bottom,
I know how you fear me.

A transformational ruse,
A standard of legacies;
Wrought by curiosity.

How I meld into this fray,
Dug deep by moles under
Roots that are risen,
Upgrown over pools of reasoning.

A rain saturates them furthur ---
The earthen creatures bloat and float
Above the sodden fantasies.

How passionately they must
Have lived to lie still so
Contentedly.

A fawn drinks from the
Clear, multitudinous pool ---
It is your baby that has risen.

Watch me dissolve and evaporate
In the hot sun,
I am air,
A Nascent Spirit ---
Transparency is my name.

(2)

No, you cannot hold me,
I wrestle free even in knowing ---
See,
You never really knew me;
I am the calamity of the unknown.

What ferocity I evoke,
What insanity,
Yet I loved you like a true friend.
How weatherproof I was to your
Uncertainties.

And what of Moonlight ---
The night alone does not disturb
The entanglements of love,
Wrangling in its ferocity,

For I sleep beneath it,
Winnowing in its germination
Unfaltered by its determination,

As, darkened, it turns,
A heinous, repetitive lullaby.
I seek naught but to endure it.

For, in it I revolve, in turn,
To create something real, substrate
Even as it sustains this world.

(3)

And what of reasoning? ---
It was The Moon.
It dragged me here.
A marsh is never dry,
It only appears aspiring to be.

See, the butterflies love
The marsh plants,
Their wings gently fold and unfold.
The nectars are invisible but to them.

They glide on rising pageantry
And, in this, how I remember them ---
I was once a seed.

The pools are deepening
In slackened brackishness
As the flotsam settles in
For the cold hard reasoning
Of Autumns approach.

I am chilled in this barrenness,
Such preservation.

You see, I am already
Empty inside,
There is no drought required to
Drain the depths that are me ---

This saturation is merely poetry.

And how does it move,
This poetry, how does it
Not remain static trapped, but free
When its voice is muted
And drowned?

It behaves as a kite on a string
Ignoring the tug and pull
Of its anchor ---
It shakes in winds of uncertainty
Even as it rises on them.

And its poetic voice
Sings in the branches of
This only tree
On higher ground ---
It is only the birds
Landing on those lofty certainties,
Those infamies.

Those eccentricities
Warble in the solitude
Of summers fade
To golden hues in
The grasses stiffening.

The poetry is the arms of
The tree reaching for the sky,
But I am here,
The sky is in me.
Look within and
You will see me.

              ------



           Inspired by these poems:

                   ' Blue Moles '
                   ' Elm '

                           - By Sylvia Plath