I pronounce today "BE NICE TO ME DAY"

So I am.

(PS I began this post 12 hours ago, stopped somewhere in the middle of the poem, and now I'll finish it....)I woke up in such a good mood I was almost nervous. "What the hell is this?" I thought. But I decided to run with it. Anyway, I got up, went to the bank, rescued my checking account from peril, and bought some good healthy groceries. I've been eating like an obese lazy bird recently. I made plans with a sweet friend for the evening and went about the rest of my day letting myself do exactly as I liked. Poor as I am, I let myself buy some $2 books of poetry from my favourite homeless bookseller guys. I used to have quite a collection of poetry but it's one of the things I left behind when I ran away to NYC. So I've been slowly picking things up here and there. I bought Ariel which I haven't read in a long time. My passion for Sylvia Path had cooled considerably by the end of my adolescence, and I pushed the poems away as so much trashing about and moaning. Going back over them with a (slightly!) more mature eye I am understanding a bit more of what is so good about them. But there's one poem I never stopped loving, and all of its meanings are new and different to me now. It has some of the most evocative and heart-piercing images I've ever encountered in a poem:

The Moon and The Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday the bells startle the sky--
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness--
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness--blackness and silence.