Breakdown..

So I’ve spent a rather large chunk of this weekend catching up on my poetry reading. Some of my favorites include W. B. Yeats, Frost, Plath, Neruda (when I’m soppy) and Keats. I also recently picked up a book by Ondaatje called “Handwriting”. It’s admittedly a little difficult to get into..(..he’s just so tangential its hard to keep up on so many levels!) but a pleasure nonetheless. Every poem seems to show different aspects of the poet to different people. It’s a matter of perception I guess. Like art..

But to get to the point here’s the poem I liked best out of this week’s picking. Plath is outrageously vague most of the times but when she makes a point…I bloody well listen! Enjoy!

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimallight of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

This is from the “Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath”, a book Pooch and Rama gave me last year. It still remains a source of unending joy! Love you!