''Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.''
- Sylvia Plath
Below the highway darkness turns the heath
To ancient shapes, to where the wind trots on hooves,
The mist acloak swirling, or further back
To that with eyes and claws and scales and beak.
She grips the wheel, following dotted lines:
No traffic and yet she keeps to the lane.
A tick could throw her lighted world out of gear,
The earth erupts into all that has been there.
As burnt stars fill the night,
I remember her like imprints of a swan's feet left on sand
Drenched in lunar ecstasy,
That she rushed in like July ebbs,
And returned with receding flows
While by the river side rests a shattered boat.
Its worn-out sails
Await a dreamer's touch, like the gush of torrential winds
with impending motion to transcend the silence of oars...
I anticipate, alone, grasping her morose clay
As the norms go before cremating—so dark and detached.
While the bond between living fingers and deceased dull eyes
Dream of galloping across meadows—
March days return with their covert light,
And huge fishes swim through the sky,
Vague earthly vapors progress in secret things and slip to silence one by one.
Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,
She reunites the lives of the sea to that of fire, grey lurchings of the ship of winter,
To the form that love carved in the guitar.
As seen in fantasy and observed in facts
We evolve to humanity from mere human beings.
As I dispose all of her that remained
And witness how waves wash away burnt stars
And how the neon beacons on masked sails, distressed...
