Birthday Letters

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

The dreamer in her Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it. That moment the dreamer in me Fell in love with her and I knew it

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 red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your life Was a liner I voyaged in. Costly education had fitted you out. Financiers and committees and consultants Effaced 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 there Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not, What eyes waited at the back of the class To check your first professional performance Against their expectations. What assessors Waited to see you justify the cost And redeem their gamble. What a furnace Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched The strange dummy stiffness, the misery, Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly Half-approximation to your idea Of the properties you hoped to ease into, And your horror in it. And the tanned Almost green undertinge of your face Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited Head pathetically tiny. You waited, Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers Of the life that judges you, and I saw The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound Which 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 lonely Girl 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 you As I looked at you, as I am stilled Permanently now, permanently Bending 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.

And you will never know what a battle I fought to keep the meaning of my words Solid with the world we were making.

But the jewel you lost was blue.

So missed everything in the white, blindfolded, rigid faces of 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, falling heaven of granite stopped, as if in a snapshot, by their hair.

But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex And your Saturday night panics, Under your hair done this way and that way, Behind what looked like rebounds And the cascade of cries diminuendo, You were undeflected. You were gold-jacketed, solid silver, Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect As through ether.

Day by day his sister grew Paler with the wound She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it Each day with her blue Breton jacket. - from Life After Death

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

I invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you. Were you conjuring me? I had no idea How I was becoming necessary, Or what emergency surgery Fate would make Of my casual self-service.

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

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

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

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 flowers By the machinery of insects. The bats' meaning Oiled 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 themselves From the love that moves the sun and other stars.

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

But red Was what you wrapped around you. Blood red.

Your journal pages. Your effort to cry words

And the knowledge Inside 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 infantryman Returning slowly out of no-man's-land, Bowed under something, never reached you-- Simply melted into the perfect light.

Their homeopathic letters, Envelopes full of carefully broken glass To lodge behind your eyes so you would see

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.