Birthday Letters

“Nobody wanted your dance,Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your flounderingDrowning life and your effort to save yourself,Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,Looking for something to give.”

“The dreamer in herHad fallen in love with me and she did not know it.That moment the dreamer in meFell in love with her and I knew it”

“What happened casually remains -”

“Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.”

“In the pit of redYou hid from the bone-clinic whitenessBut the jewel you lost was blue.”

“And you will never know what a battleI fought to keep the meaning of my wordsSolid with the world we were making.”

“I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your lifeWas a liner I voyaged in.Costly education had fitted you out.Financiers and committees and consultantsEffaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.You trembled with the new life of those engines.That first morning,Before your first class at College, you sat thereSipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,What eyes waited at the back of the classTo check your first professional performanceAgainst their expectations. What assessorsWaited to see you justify the costAnd redeem their gamble. What a furnaceOf eyes waited to prove your metal. I watchedThe strange dummy stiffness, the misery,Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, uglyHalf-approximation to your ideaOf the properties you hoped to ease into,And your horror in it. And the tannedAlmost green undertinge of your faceShrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaitedHead pathetically tiny.You waited,Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezersOf the life that judges you, and I sawThe flayed nerve, the unhealable face-woundWhich was all you had for courage.I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,Were terrors that killed you once already.Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonelyGirl who was going to die.That blue suit.A mad, execution uniform,Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,Unable to fathom what stilled youAs I looked at you, as I am stilledPermanently now, permanentlyBending so briefly at your open coffin.”

“You were overloaded. I said nothing.I said nothing. The stone man made soup.The burning woman drank it.”

“But the jewel you lost was blue.”

“But inside your sob-sodden KleenexAnd your Saturday night panics,Under your hair done this way and that way,Behind what looked like reboundsAnd the cascade of cries diminuendo,You were undeflected.You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfectAs through ether.”

“So missed everythingin the white, blindfolded, rigid facesof those women. I felt their frailty, yes:friable, burnt aluminium.Fragile, like the mantle of a gas-lamp.But made nothing of that massive, starless, mid-fall, fallingheaven of granite stopped, as if in a snapshot,by their hair.”

“We were where we we had never been in our lives.Visitors--visiting even ourselves.The bats were part of the sun's machinery,Connected to the machinery of the flowersBy the machinery of insects. The bats' meaningOiled the unfailing logic of the earth.Cosmic requirement--on the wings of a goblin.A rebuke to our flutter of half-participation...Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,They knew how, and when, to detach themselvesFrom the love that moves the sun and other stars.”

“In my position, the right witchdoctorMight have caught you in flight with his bare hands,Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,Godless, happy, quieted.I managedA wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.”

“Your journal pages. Your effort to cry words”

“And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.”

“But redWas what you wrapped around you.Blood red.”

“Their homeopathic letters, Envelopes full of carefully broken glassTo lodge behind your eyes so you would see”

“Day by day his sister grewPaler with the woundShe could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed itEach day with her blue Breton jacket.- from Life After Death”

“The Tender Place Your temples , where the hair crowded in , Were the tender place. Once to check I dropped a file across the electrodes of a twelve-volt battery -- it exploded Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up. Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed The thunderbolt into your skull. In their bleached coats, with blenched faces, They hovered again To see how you were, in your straps. Whether your teeth were still whole . The hand on the calibrated lever Again feeling nothing Except feeling nothing pushed to feel Some squirm of sensation . Terror Was the cloud of you Waiting for these lightnings. I saw An oak limb sheared at a bang. You your Daddy's leg . How many seizures Did you suffer this god to grab you By the roots of the hair? The reports Escaped back into clouds. What went up Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper And the nerve· threw off its skin Like a burning child Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you A rigid bent bit of wire Across the Boston City grid. The lights In the Senate House dipped As your voice dived inwards Right through the bolt-hole basement. Came up, years later, Over-exposed, like an X-ray -- Brain-map still dark-patched With the scorched-earth scars Of your retreat . And your words , Faces reversed from the light , Holding in their entrails.”

“So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallenDream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,The other face, the real, staring upwards.”

“Now I wanted to show you such a beachWould set inside your head another jewel,And lift you like the gentlest electric shockInto an altogether other England--An Avalon for which I had the wavelength, Deep inside my head a little crystal.”

“And as it grew up and began to enjoy itselfWhat would we do with an unpredictable, Powerful, bounding fox? That long-mouthed, flashing temperament?That necessary nightly twenty milesAnd that vast hunger for everything beyond us?How would we cope with its cosmic derangementsWhenever we moved?...If I had grasped that whatever comes with a foxIs what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage--I would not have failed the test.”

“I invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you.Were you conjuring me? I had no ideaHow I was becoming necessary,Or what emergency surgery Fate would makeOf my casual self-service.”

“And the knowledgeInside the hill on which you are sitting, A moated fort hill, bigger than your house, Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment, Coming towards you like an infantrymanReturning slowly out of no-man's-land, Bowed under something, never reached you--Simply melted into the perfect light.”

“What can I tell you that you do not knowOf the life after death?Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled usWith your Slavic AsiaticEpicanthic fold, but would becomeSo perfectly your eyes,Became wet jewels,The hardest substance of the purest painAs I fed him in his high white chair.Great hands of grief were wringing and wringingHis wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.But his mouth betrayed you — it acceptedThe spoon in my disembodied handThat reached through from the life that had survived you.Day by day his sister grewPaler with the woundShe could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed itEach day with her blue Breton jacket.By night I lay awake in my bodyThe Hanged ManMy neck-nerve uprooted and the tendonWhich fastened the base of my skullTo my left shoulderTorn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots —I fancied the pain could be explainedIf I were hanging in the spiritFrom a hook under my neck-muscle.Dropped from lifeWe three made a deep silenceIn our separate cots.We were comforted by wolves.Under that February moon and the moon of MarchThe Zoo had come close.And in spite of the cityWolves consoled us. Two or three times each nightFor minutes on endThey sang. They had found where we lay.And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves —All lifted their voices togetherWith the grey Northern pack.The wolves lifted us in their long voices.They wound us and enmeshed usIn their wailing for you, their mourning for us,They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,In the fallen snow, under falling snow,As my body sank into the folk-taleWhere the wolves are singing in the forestFor two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,Into orphansBeside the corpse of their mother.”

“You carried it all, like shards and moults on a tray,To be reassembledIn the poem to be written so prettily,And to be worn like a fiesta maskBy the daemon that gazed through itAs through empty sockets – that still gazesThrough it at me.”

“How could Fate stage a scenario so symbolic without having secreted the tragedy ending and the ironic death?”

“The lawn lay like the pristine waiting page Of a prison report. Who would write what upon it I never gave a thought. A dumb creature, looping at the furnace door On its demon’s prong, Was a pen already writing Wrong is right, right wrong.”

“The rag rugThat had heaped out onto your lapSlid to the floor. There it lay, coiledBetween us. However it came,And wherever it found its tongue, its fang, its meaning,It survived our Eden.”

“Like a newer or much older religionIn me alone, to be carriedEverywhere with me -- deeper catacombs,And with a stronger God.”