A Poem for Wednesday, and a New Painting..."What Lies Beneath"

"What Lies Beneath"
24" x 36"
Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
The original painting is for sale and prints are also available on Etsy.


Feeling a little somber today...maybe it's the cold.  Snowed in for the fifth day in 2 weeks, I pulled out some sketch books from high school and found this Sylvia Plath poem on one of the first pages.  Yes, going back to my teen-angst-ridden, Plath-quoting days is always an interesting place to revisit. Despite all the years that passed when I first stumbled across her poetry, the words are still so powerful to me. The poem spoke through my new work and let me see it in a new light.

"Elm"

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root; 

It is what you fear. 

I do not fear it: I have been there. 

Is it the sea you hear in me,

Its dissatisfactions? 

Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? 

Love is a shadow. 

How you lie and cry after it. 

Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. 

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,

Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, 

Echoing, echoing. 

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? 

This is rain now, the big hush. 

And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic. 

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. 

Scorched to the root 

My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires. 

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. 

A wind of such violence 

Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. 

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me 

Cruelly, being barren. 

Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. 

I let her go. I let her go 

Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. 

How your bad dreams possess and endow me. 

I am inhabited by a cry. 

Nightly it flaps out 

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. 

I am terrified by this dark thing 

That sleeps in me; 

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. 

Clouds pass and disperse. 

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? 

Is it for such I agitate my heart? 

I am incapable of more knowledge. 

What is this, this face 

So murderous in its strangle of branches?-- 

Its snaky acids kiss. 

It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults 

That kill, that kill, that kill.