Dark Fruit

'In this light the blood is black,  
Tell me my name.'  
   
                 - Sylvia Plath  
 
 
I forgot who I was under a tree,  
The garish light  
Filtered by fractured leaves.  
The white knuckles at dawn,  
Those dumb uncertainties.  
 
Who is it? I say.  
I am halfway to Moonrise ---  
A quickening of utterances  
Ushers me to the occasion  
Of my own acquiescing.  
 
I remember too much  
To abort this freedom.  
 
          .....  
 
Tell me who I am,  
Oh, furtive seekers of folly  
Frantic in your love-drunk assertations.  
I live, therefore I am loved ---  
I feel the hesitation of it all.  
 
Wet with regret and  
Sane of a life within  
An eddy of preservation  
Where I remain white as of yet  
And unfallen, unripened.  
 
The fulfilling result of time  
Drops like mercury ---  
Lost and free to roam  
The preemptory gravesite inhales  
Assuaging doom.  
 
Here, now the moon has risen.  
How the ripe fruit gleams.  
 
           .....  
 
If not here, then where, elsewhere?  
That is the sanity of it.  
The ripened corpuscles are breathing  
The slack, sentient air of deliberacy in this ---  
Hope's crawlspace, this failsafe attic.  
A forewarned finisterre  
Flutters its dust with  
Each footstep, each crawl.  
My fists are at my shoulders  
And only unnattached to  
Spun salvations, salubrious creations  
In a maudlin room of my undoing, ungoing,  
The regrets darken and fall in shadows  
Cast by afternoon sun.  
 
Then it goes dark.  
 
          .....  
 
What light to see by,  
Morning.  
What dim cacophany  
Planing along a mirrors edge.  
I see the image dropping,  
The ghasps of horror  
The aubergine sighs  
The indifference  
At the almost dead genesis  
Of deformities doom  
To self-containment and questions,  
Who am I?  
 
           .....  
 
Again the tree with mirror-leaves, flat hands;  
Lame and anteflexed.  
I feel them lifting within ---  
Is it mercy, a glint of regeneration?  
The hands are buds of promise  
Waiting to bloom after a torrential rain.  
I saw the pieces of red heart-flutter  
In the pools under fates sentence  
And knew it was me,  
Nameless and reflected so truthfully.  
 
And it is in this reflection  
I grow old, wise  
A tedium of sentenary bliss.  
Now I know what I hadn’t before,  
I know the calling  
And it devours me  
Like a mirror facing the same old walls  
Peeling its layers  
Revealing nothing more than  
What it is shown.  
It is pink? It is pink.  
The mirror told me nothing.  
Nothing the calloused soles of my feet  
Could reveal more deftly.  
I feel them speaking  
In undertones of remorse  
In their grainy, silent language.  
 
             .....  
 
Silent wanderings thrown  
Off cliffs of resplendence  
Their despondent caves,  
Arteries of inner sanctum to the unknown.  
I never knew how such truths  
Were thrown and hurled into  
Winds of foretelling.  
 
I never heard her story ---  
The old woman who mirrors me.  
I never gave her a chance.  
I never gave her a grace.  
I only stunted her in heavied removal.  
And inside her: What never was ---  
Flourished like the air  
That dispersed in a hopeless storm.  
The barren truth in these  
Barracks of endless youth.  
I glow white in this mucous of creativity  
And I burst forth, my songs screaming  
Bells peeling, voices drowning.  
The real me that never was.  
And she.. And she  
Was all I had wanted to be.  
 
I am a leaf,  
I am many leaves  
Fruiting green to darken.  
Oh, purple death  
How vividly you loom.  
 
        .....  
 
Nameless. Faceless  
A Gorgons head atop a  
Malformed atrocity,  
And I, falling among the  
Teardrops of its cold skin.  
Shuddering, shivering, never alone.  
A million things surround me  
And I am consumed by them,  
Their pert ears listening to my inquiries,  
My shouts, my fits of animosity  
Fly about my head like it is a  
Cavern of Shadows and they are  
Bats drinking the nectar of my synaptic firings  
Glinting, wherein the white blooms topple  
And fall in their heavy bearings.  
What credulous rivers to flow like tributaries  
Diaphanous and colorless like my mind  
In the fluids of a final embalming of  
Encapsulate knowledge;  
a translucent albumin.  
 
I know nothing  
And the mirror never spoke  
In its silver halls of reflection  
Anything of such redolence.  
I rattle like a sunflower  
Reduced by seasons of atrophy  
As my attic of self empties its harborings  
And ejects its monsters  
Even as new ones are born  
On a horizons new dawn.  
 
         .....  
 
Shocked into being  
I dragged remnants of an  
Inner bodiless dream and propped them  
On a mantle of decorum.  
I wrote about them  
Firing each synaptic advancement.  
Dentrifications were olden  
Whitening like bony promineneces  
Surrounded by putrified remains of my days.  
My hands were the bones  
The pages were fallen leaves  
The tree was a glass case to  
View the montage ---  
A mind on display,  
Squirming in its oozing placental renderings.  
Everyone shrank through the glass  
I was encased under, and I got too big,  
Oh, to go back to blissful smallness,  
Puny obsolescent obscurity  
As even the horror of such  
Consumes my corridors  
Within tree branches in overwhelming silences ---  
The tree is mute, only the wind gives it a voice  
And feathers escape its holdings, its capturings  
Even it has no retention of  
Its own inclinations to speak in  
A fated, voiceless melody.  
 
          .....  
 
Clambering, I gazed upward.  
Is this heaven, this reflection,  
This desirous pandering to a white angel ---  
The monstrosity reflects itself in multitudes  
Endlessly repeating its same sad song,  
And I churn out yesterdays in featureless catachisms  
On a white slab of reckoning to be  
Doctored into normalcy ---  
A spy-glass surrenders its judgements like  
The whole world in a raindrop is viewed  
And the tree is protection  
It is a jar of encapsulation  
Of everything experienced.  
 
Yet the tree drinks the rain, absorbs it  
While circular glass only distorts it ---  
The specimen within is white and pure  
But hideous, dead and  
Surrounded by black stagnancy ---  
Like passive stars in a night sky  
It only absorbs what it already contains and knows of;  
It is a terminality of reasoning.  
 
In this light I asked my name,  
I prayed for a semblant image.  
I spoke to the darkness and  
Heard its heart beating,  
Sloshing its essence into my awareness.  
Under a tree was where I became enveloped  
There I heard everything I wanted to hear,  
I heard the leaves rushing, hastening  
To know themselves in withered veins of treason  
Which give up their lives in unreckoned ignorant bliss  
 
Here the rain cannot surround me,  
Enfold me like arresting fluid,  
I decay regardless.  
The words escape through osmosis to  
Reveal a watermark of knowing I am  
And I heard the confirmation  
The storm tide of relinquishment ---  
It all escaped me like birds fleeing slight movement  
And the embrace was the cold logic of the mind,  
Bluing its black inkwell in its  
Jar of suspension  
Ebbing its ledger of truth,  
Not knowing to where it runs,  
Not knowing its true self.  
 
In this light,  
My name was not uttered.  
 
              .....