Elm<br /><br />BY SYLVIA PLATH<br /><br />I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: <br />It is what you fear.<br />I do not fear it: I have been there.<br /><br />Is it the sea you hear in me, <br />Its dissatisfactions?<br />Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?<br /><br />Love is a shadow.<br />How you lie and cry after it<br />Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.<br /><br />All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,<br />Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, <br />Echoing, echoing.<br /><br />Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? <br />This is rain now, this big hush.<br />And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.<br /><br />I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. <br />Scorched to the root<br />My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.<br /><br />Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. <br />A wind of such violence<br />Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.<br /><br />The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me <br />Cruelly, being barren.<br />Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.<br /><br />I let her go. I let her go<br />Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. <br />How your bad dreams possess and endow me.<br /><br />I am inhabited by a cry. <br />Nightly it flaps out<br />Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.<br /><br />I am terrified by this dark thing <br />That sleeps in me;<br />All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.<br /><br />Clouds pass and disperse.<br />Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? <br />Is it for such I agitate my heart?<br /><br />I am incapable of more knowledge. <br />What is this, this face<br />So murderous in its strangle of branches?——<br /><br />Its snaky acids kiss.<br />It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults <br />That kill, that kill, that kill.