Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, Londres, Faber and Faber, 2010.

Flutes Notes from a Reedy Pond

 

Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,

To our bower at the lily root.

Overhead the old umbrellas of summer

Wither like pithless hands. There is little shelter.

 

Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank

Dominion.The stars are no nearer.

Already frogmouth and fishmouth drink

The liquor of indolence, and all things sink

 

Into a soft caul of forgetfulness.

The fugitive colors die.

Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,

The lampheaded nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.

 

Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppet-master,

Wear masks of horn to bed.

This is not death, it is something safer.

The wingy myths won’t tug at us any more:

 

The molts are tongueless that sang from above the water

Of Golgotha at the tip a reed,

And how a god flimsy as a baby’s finger

Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air.