I wasn’t going to write here, but I cannot have an empty blog. That’s just silly.
We’ll see how I do on my updates, though.
I do want to post something, but this time it will not be my own.
This is the poem that made me want to write with the purpose of connecting with people, rather than just to clean out my head. Sylvia Plath was the first author that that I felt I could relate with.
Love Letter
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just tow me an inch, no--
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.
That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter--
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chisled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.
And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I was was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.
I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.
Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.
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Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
ReplyDeleteyou asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs, that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other principals prevail in this glum haven, don't they? If that's what is.
Then the wind fell of its own accord.
We went out and saw that it had actually happened.
The season stood motionless, alert. How still the dropp was on the burr I know not. I come all packaged and serene, yet I keep loosing things.
I wonder about Australia. Is it anything about Canada? Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete the one in me? Or must I relearn my filling system?
Can we trust others to indict us who see us only in the evening rush hour, and never stop to think? O, I was so bright about you, my songbird, once. Now, cattails immolated in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for. The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off center. At least that's how it feels to me.
I know it as well as the streets in the map of my imagined industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past. There was never any fullness that was going to be; you waited in line for things, and the stained light was inpenitent. 'Spiky' was one adjective that came to mind,
yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal. Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke in cafes, and outside the great ashen bird streamed from lettered display windows, and waited a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture.
John Ashbery
I aim to read Ashbery this season. :)
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