Tuesday, November 3, 2009

«Love is a Parallax» (by Sylvia Plath)


"Perspective betrays with its dichotomy: train tracks always meet, not here, but only in the impossible mind's eye; horizons beat a retreat, as we embark on sophist seas, to overtake that mark, where wave pretends to drench real sky...

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd that: one man's devil is another's god, or that the solar spectrum, is a multitude of shaded grays; suspense on the quicksands of ambivalence... is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I, until the stars tick out a lullaby... about each cosmic pro and con... nothing changes, for all the blazing of our drastic jargon, but clock hands, that move implacably from twelve... to one.

We raise our arguments, like sitting ducks, to knock them down with logic or with luck... and contradict ourselves for fun... the waitress holds our coats... and we put on the raw wind like a scarf: love is a faun, who insists his playmates run...

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun, would have me swallow the entire sun... like an enormous oyster, down the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark of comet... hara-kiri through the dark, should inflame the sleeping town!

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb... and dames in dubious doorways, forget their monday names... caper with candles in their heads...
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in scattering candy, from a zeppelin... playing his prodigal charades?

The moon leans down... to took the tilting fish, in the rare river... we wink and laugh... we lavish blessings... right and left and cry hello, and then hello again in deaf! churchyard ears, until the starlit stiff graves... all carol in reply...

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans to call... for curtain on our thousand scenes!?... brazen actors mock at him, multiply pink harlequins... and sing in gay ventriloquy, from wing to wing... while footlights flare and houselights dim...

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins... and separate the flutes from violins: the algebra of absolutes, explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes that jar!... while each polemic jackanapes, joins his enemies' recruits...

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing': though prima donna pouts and critic stings, there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act... a fierce brief fusion, which dreamers call... real! and realists... illusion: an insight like the flight of birds!

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing the secret of their ecstasy's... in going some day, moving... one will drop, and dropping... die, to trace a wound that heals... only to reopen as flesh congeals: cycling phoenix never stops!?

So... we shall walk barefoot... on walnut shells of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells... and heavens... till the spirits squeak surrender: to build our bed as high, as jack's bold beanstalk... lie and love... till sharp scythe, hacks away our rationed days and weeks...

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down... and god or void? appalls us... till we drown in our own tears: today we start to pay the piper, with each breath... yet love knows not of death... nor calculus above... it knows the simple sum of: heart plus heart."