these hills are too green & sweet to have tasted salt

I am squeezing this post in before the lovely Poetry Wednesday ends. It's been a busy day, and only now, after Presanctified and take-out sushi, am I able to sit at my computer. It is quiet in our little living room: just the sounds of typing and clicking as Charles and I sit with our laptops, mugs of tea side by side on the coffee table.

Wednesdays go like this: I leave the house early for my DreamWeaver class at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) on 23rd and Lexington. After my four and a half hour class, I take the subway back uptown to 125th Street in Harlem and work-out at the gym. Then I walk 14 blocks home, usually stopping along the way at the bank and/or grocery store. At home I pay the nanny, make sure Ike is fed, and load the stroller with toys and snacks to get us through Presanctified. The church is a 10-minute walk, and Charles meets us there at 6:30. Half way through service I stroll around the neighborhood with Ike and place a take-out order at one of the Chinese or Japanese or Thai restaurants in the area. I return to church, put Ike in his PJs, take communion, and then head home, picking up our take-out order on our walk home. I have gotten so used to this schedule that I am sad that next week will be the last Presanctified service of Lent.

All this has nothing really to do with the poem I'm posting today, except it may explain why I am posting another Plath poem with little ceremony. My Wednesday schedule, added to the fact that I didn't write my post on Tuesday night, leaves me here, at 10:15 pm on a quiet Wednesday evening, with Blackberrying.

And it is a poem I love. In its fullness and its sadness: the lushness of the green hills and the cold metallic expanse of the sea. I suppose it's no stretch to say that the sea is a metaphor for death, just as the ripe berries are a metaphor for life.

B L A C K B E R R Y I N G

by Sylvia Plath 

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,   

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.   

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,   

gapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me   

To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock   

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space   

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths   

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.