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    Crossing The Water
    Crossing The Water
    Crossing The Water
    Ebook73 pages41 minutes

    Crossing The Water

    By Beverly Barton

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    About this ebook

    "Crossing the Water, a collection of poems written just prior to those in Ariel, . . . is of immense importance in recording [Plath's] extraordinary development. One senses on every page a voice coming into its own, the chaos of a lifetime at last getting ready to assume its final, triumphant shape."  — Kirkus Reviews

    Sylvia Plath's extraordinary collection pushes the envelope between dark and light, between our deep passions and desires that are often in tension with our duty to family and society. Water becomes a metaphor for the surface veneer that many of us carry, but Plath explores how easily this surface can be shaken and disturbed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9780062669483
    Crossing The Water
    Author

    Beverly Barton

    This sixth-generation Alabamian from the U.S. is a wife, mother, and grandmother.An avid reader since childhood, Beverly wrote her first book at the age of nine. Since then, she has gone on to write well over sixty novels and is a New York Times bestselling author.

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    • 3/5
      "Mirror" stuck out to me the most, the others not so much.
    • 5/5
      I always come back to 'In Plaster' and 'Mirror'. Such a stunning collection. It's not really fair to compare it to Ariel. It is where she was at that time.

    Book preview

    Crossing The Water - Beverly Barton

    Wuthering Heights

    The horizons ring me like faggots,

    Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.

    Touched by a match, they might warm me,

    And their fine lines singe

    The air to orange

    Before the distances they pin evaporate,

    Weighting the pale sky with a solider color.

    But they only dissolve and dissolve

    Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

    There is no life higher than the grasstops

    Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

    Pours by like destiny, bending

    Everything in one direction.

    I can feel it trying

    To funnel my heat away.

    If I pay the roots of the heather

    Too close attention, they will invite me

    To whiten my bones among them.

    The sheep know where they are,

    Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

    Grey as the weather.

    The black slots of their pupils take me in.

    It is like being mailed into space,

    A thin, silly message.

    They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,

    All wig curls and yellow teeth

    And hard, marbly baas.

    I come to wheel ruts, and water

    Limpid as the solitudes

    That flee through my fingers.

    Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;

    Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.

    Of people the air only

    Remembers a few odd syllables.

    It rehearses them moaningly:

    Black stone, black stone.

    The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

    Among all horizontals.

    The grass is beating its head distractedly.

    It is too delicate

    For a life in such company;

    Darkness terrifies it.

    Now, in valleys narrow

    And black as purses, the house lights

    Gleam like small change.

    Finisterre

    This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,

    Cramped on nothing. Black

    Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding

    With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,

    Whitened by the faces of the drowned.

    Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks—

    Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.

    The sea cannons into their ear, but they don’t budge.

    Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.

    The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells

    Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,

    Almost too small for the mists to bother with.

    The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia—

    Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.

    They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.

    They go up without hope, like sighs.

    I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.

    When they free me, I am beaded with tears.

    Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is striding toward the horizon,

    Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.

    A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot

    A peasant woman in black

    Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.

    Our Lady

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