morning song

love set you going like a fat gold watch.
the midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
took its place among the elements.

voices echo, magnifying your arrival. new statue.
in the drafty museum, your nakedness
shadows our safety. we stand round blankly as walls.

i'm no more your mother
than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
effacement at the wind's hand.

all night your moth-breath flickers
among the flat pink roses. i wake to listen,
a far sea moves in my ear.

one cry, and i stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
in my victorian nightgown.
your mouth opens clean as a cat's. the window square

whitens and swallows its dull stars. and now you try
your handful of notes:
the clear vowels rise like balloons.

Hey, my first poem that doesn't rhyme. Not coincidentally, my first line break mistake (it should read "moth-breath/flickers") Like I said yesterday, I plan on memorizing Sylvia Plath's book Ariel in its entirety, probably a poem a week. We'll see what happens when I get to the longer poems; I might start stretching them over multiple days. But let's look at this one.

I frequently hear, especially in workshop settings, that similes are just weaker versions of metaphors. I hate this. I love similes, and I think this poem in particular shows what you can do with them that wouldn't work with metaphors. Just think how the poem would read if the similes here were replaced with equivalent metaphors: all over the place. Metaphors, I think, draw more attention to themselves, and get stronger when developed over multiple lines. Similes are more subtle, and are more easily slipped into a stanza without making the reader stop and think, "Wait, what are we talking about, now?"