Sylvia Plath - 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 your 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 gallop 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, this 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 radiance 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 hiss. 
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults 
That kill, that kill, that kill.