Her Love Is A Madness

‘I fancied you’d return the way you said,  
But I grow old and I forget your name.’  
                         -Sylvia Plath  
        
 
When did I become mad,  
the day I began loving you,  
singing in my head how we  
are one instead of two  
 
Or crashing ashore in winters wrath,  
rockweed wringing hands around  
granite boulders moved only in storms  
at highest peaks of existence  
where you were there, only you and I  
and the fullest moon ---  
A lunacy!  
 
Did you ever envision me  
that I might see you there,  
did your seasons ever care  
to birth me in spring,  
exalt me in summer,  
kill me in fall, or  
forget me in winter,  
Were you ever there at all?  
 
Her love is a madness  
and it comes quite frequently to call.  
 
(2)  
 
Man, seeking me ---  
you go astray and I fall apart inside.  
There are no other she’s  
to the one inside me.  
 
She is a heresy  
a flare to ash, gold to molten  
thus he loves her.  
 
She is at home on him  
each time she dies,  
each time she cries,  
he rises, crashing alive.  
 
He is a figment of her mind  
and so heartily derived in  
mad reams of longing  
ever heavy to bear,  
in this she can almost see him there  
if she looks with an innermost eye  
and squints, stares.  
That picture on my mantle is  
almost him, she swears  
as he dissolves on her tongue like  
a losenge of sedation.  
 
And she sleeps with him  
ever near, ever dear.  
They turn together in sleep  
and he sings inside her head  
a melancholy song of what could be  
if only we were free,  
only, you are only inside me.  
 
Her heart in tow he  
creeps along, creeps along,  
he waits in mortem to echo  
her maddest love song ---  
Like the surf it rises and swells  
it crashes on shores never to tell  
only to breathe, only to bray,  
and like the turning tide it  
slinks away in morbid dread.  
 
Love is a cancer and it flies angry;  
a thunderbird inside her head.  
 
(3)  
 
She knew him once before a fall,  
she knew his love of her only once  
or never at all.  
He was the red that adorned her hellfire,  
he was the blue that extinguished her pyre.  
 
She, a tiny boat afloat on a sea of him ---  
He was hope, a paper heart;  
he was a wish to never part,  
he was immaterial.  
 
Now he sinks so low to a sandy bottom,  
he retreats.  
Her heart closes in on him like sand  
around a crab when it burrows deep.  
 
(4)  
 
Inside her head will you ever sleep  
swaying along with the maddest refrain  
cycling between a known man and a name.  
 
Ever alive in a brine of solutions  
I respire, to swallow our every occlusion  
a love of The Sea, I become like her  
reaching her crested hands to  
every far shore.  
 
Deepest, darkest dive pool to swim in,  
furthest a fathom to ever live in  
love is...  
 
Like The Sea I love the creatures,  
all their turmoil, their strangest features.  
When they starve and when they thrive,  
I love them all in their fight to survive.  
 
And My Love comes calling,  
a seabird on a wing riding an updraft  
as my ankles are embraced in slimy rockweed  
sucking me in where I stand.  
 
And the shore is so very far away,  
framed in glass as on the clearest, fairest day.  
I look to the blue where horizon meets sea  
and love is there, somewhere ---  
A tiny white speck moving away from me.  
 
It is a land far away, it seems,  
and I am in between her and me.  
Here is somewhere I never longed to be.  
 
Foaming, frothing,  
her salty elements are absorbed by me.  
In time, I will wash ashore with these---  
Her very affections of me.  
 
           .....