A phantom grace: three blackout/erasures of Sylvia Plath poems

Source material: Sylvia Plath’s Sleep in the Mojave Desert from Crossing the Water

Source material: Sylvia Plath's Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond

Source material: Sylvia Plath's Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest

Between Being and Becoming

  

Desire marks each of us so differently

no matter how long, how fiercely we love.

Between being and becoming, we fail

so often and in such ordinary ways.

See how the sliding days silt in,

taking our other hundred lives with the water -

each one waiting, having borne us this far,

becoming finned and whole, swimming off.

Silence completes us, simple as those few notes

that answer the dark on a summer night and fall still.

Source text for Cento: selected last lines from Jane Hirshfield's Of Gravity & Angels

Sleep

Out here,


             It is dangerous.



mad men inhabit the blue hour,



glittery fictions glide

In the crevice of shadow


comfortless as firedogs in the wind.


here,

heat-cracked crickets

creep into our hair.

 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Erasure of Sylvia Plath's Sleep in the Mojave Desert from Crossing the Water

As if from the Shipwreck we returned - A Neruda Cento

Climbing vines murmured as we passed.

The gray stones knew us - the wind

in the shadow. Between you and me

a new door opened.


All that we learned was of no use:

we emerged from the ocean

as if from the shipwreck we returned.


Everything carries me to you:

aromas, light, metals,

boats filled from within with black light,


there too I would like to let my blood sleep

against the devil's webs,

     against organized misery.



You have seen the same sky each day,

the same dark winter mud, the endless branching

of the plum trees and their dark-purple sweetness.



Night has fallen for you.

Perhaps at dawn we shall see each other again.

 
 




Cento Source Text: The Captain's Verses Pablo Neruda , 1952
Image: Fisherman at Sea by William Turner

Paradise Lost: an erasure

Restore us, chaos

I invoke thy Song,

       
the vast in me is dark.



Nine times the Space that measures 

Day and Night:



Let us not slip.



Let us rest if any rest can harbour there.



 

Five Ways of Looking at a Peregrine

I.

In a forest of leafless ash,

all that stirs

is the wind and a peregrine.



II.

The constellation that shimmered

when you were born

is as irretrievable as the peregrine's innocence.



III.

The peregrine's grace

is a measure of feathers

in a minor key.



IV.

Two lovers are more than the sum of themselves.

They promise to honor the unknown they'll engender

as they honor the peregrine roosting in the shadows.



V.

I do not know what to heed:

the hunger for silence,

the satiety of stillness,

or the merciful transience

of the peregrine.