CHANGE OF VISION OF A MAENAD AS SHE GOES UNDER THE SEA This title was one of Hughes’s “subjects,” for which Plath never wrote a poem. “As was their custom, whenever Plath experienced writer’s block, Hughes wrote out lists of poem subjects, often accompanied by astrological doodles.” —No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry, edited by Stephen C. Enniss & Karen V. Kukil I descend again. Below the swells, we became families, become familiar. Colonies, culture. In early years, I chanted backward into temples of polished coral, silver alcoves shining. Like a vibrating guitar string or the waves of sound filling a flute’s corridor, a returning force enters me. Oscillations whorl into widening spheres. The Earth pulls me toward its fiery heart. An equal force calls me to surface. Always with a stab of dread. I do what I must, learning to live twice. On land, I have patter with agnostic feet. Despite apparatus, land dwellers cannot enter the emerald Sargasso, bubbles threading dark arpeggios. Although we chant flutes’ voices, don’t believe the myth of sirens. Don’t believe mythology’s bloody froth hatched a goddess. Books say she rose from her father’s castration. I knew no such mutilation, nor was sanguine mousse the stuff of my awakening. I was a handful of salt, summoned into icy brine. I passed through brink, my weight weightless. No fires burned. I wanted light, breathing water.Waves are oscillations in the water's surface. For oscillations to exist and to propagate, like the vibrating of a guitar string or the standing waves in a flute, there must be a returning force that brings equilibrium. The tension in a string and the pressure of the air are such forces. Without these, neither the string nor the flute could produce tones. The standing waves in musical instruments bounce their energy back and forth inside the string or the flute's cavity. The oscillations that are passed to the air are different in that they travel in widening spheres outward. These travelling waves have a direction and speed in addition to their tone or timbre. In air their returning force is the compression of the air molecules. In surface waves, the returning force is gravity, the pull of the Earth. Hence the name 'gravity waves' for water waves. In solids, the molecules are tightly connected together, which prevents them from moving freely, but they can vibrate. Water is a liquid and its molecules are allowed to move freely although they are placed closely together. In gases, the molecules are surrounded by vast expanses of vacuum space, which allows them to move freely and at high speed. In all these media, waves are propagated by compression of the medium. However, the surface waves between two media (water and air), behave very different and solely under the influence of gravity, which is much weaker than that of elastic compression, the method by which sound propagates.
THE STONES OF THE CITY—THEIR PATIENT SUFFERANCE (REACQUISITIONED AS THEY ARE) This title was one of Hughes’s “subjects,” for which Plath never wrote a poem. “As was their custom, whenever Plath experienced writer’s block, Hughes wrote out lists of poem subjects, often accompanied by astrological doodles.” —No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry, edited by Stephen C. Enniss & Karen V. Kukil Color of wind, of mind. Livid lacerations in gray—watermarks speak us. Trains grub through us. Drunks crash into their lives on our cobblestones. Although pigeons wear our grayed shades, they disavow us. Scarred, sacrificed into slab, tile, block, entablature—we vanish in calculus. Thick as resentment, we buttress skyscrapers. Without our heft, our dark schist, those lofty stories would at last relinquish their gleam. Perilous sum. MIDNIGHT IN A MOUNTAIN VILLAGE This title was one of Hughes’s “subjects,” for which Plath never wrote a poem. “As was their custom, whenever Plath experienced writer’s block, Hughes wrote out lists of poem subjects, often accompanied by astrological doodles.” —No Other Appetite: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry, edited by Stephen C. Enniss & Karen V. Kukil Stars are spikes of ice, leaking over steepled geometries. Baize undulates more sensually than a tear. While stars rinse each house, lungs heave: children sleep. Angry parents make love. Rivulets —ignored by cartographers—tattoo Prelapsarian stone. Their scrawl writes, unwrites histories unread. Inside a house, lit by breath, a man transcribes a clatter of icicles. His pen hurts the page as it scrapes its skin, flays secrets. His pen writes the village alive.