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In the night-hours of a baby’s cough
who I did not birth and am
not raising, but who nonetheless
calls me the false name of family
and clings to my leg when a dog
frightens her on the street,
I set about on a task
of excision
long overdue.
Sylvia stood at the edge
of Ted’s dreams and demanded
This time, don’t fail me,1
but I mean to extract
no such promise from you — your watery ghost
which shimmers even now
at every passing season
or at any sudden move
I make.
Let me
set you free: I release you
from the standard vows,
no vociferation, I offer
no cry of injustice
to the preoccupied universe.
I can live
with all we’ve done.
Instead, if you want to prove yourself
the toadie of good-witchery,
this time, your hand
on the immortal throttle,
don’t let me
fail myself.
Banish the lone candle
held up to a window
divided into nine panes
before it shatters in the face
of my reflection.
Allow only what is living in me
to live, none of the rotten
under-log we set to ferment
and hid beneath the rolling
trunks of time. No more now
that calls from someplace
elsewise than Yeats’ glade,
I shall find some peace there,2
he wrote, like a dagger,
and my father
sang to me like syrup
and I recited back, my voice
wrapped in coughing fits
at two, longing for a garden
out of time, the cough
that echoes now
from the next room
and excuses us
from my sleep, makes
an excuse for us both
It’s the translation of a set of Welsh wings
that alight on the roof of the damned
Was it a stalk or a stem
we were talking about that time
Was it a heron or a swan
Cygnet or a crane
With some Joan Didion formidable sense
that we could force Anne’s discipline
onto Anne’s madness,3
was it a raven sitting on top of a gravestone
like No joke
Like we just drove past it
and had to transcribe it
in spite of how disappointed
all of the other poets would be in this
illiteracy of death
Was there something singular
about our badness? About the way
we learned to inhabit it, stretching
our toes all the way to the corners
like hospital ends
Army cadets covering
our straw mattresses with sheets
Did we lump the straw to one side or the other?
Sleep crookedly? Were you the calm
and I the crazy?
Were you sinister and I spoken-for?
Was there something pastoring us
from the dark corners of a cathedral
we only intended to walk into
for its glass arches
when a monk named Maximilian
led us into the chapel
in the hours friars keep
for conversation and let us
say a prayer that had been
bottlenecking in its lay container?
I could see clear from one ridge
to another, an infinity mirror
of lives that would be lived just the same
if nothing in the pattern
was cut differently at the start
Sylvia and her typewriter,
Anne and her misspellings,
Robert Lowell and his lack
of institutions after 40, as if
there was something steadying
in old age, and not that they’d simply
discovered among the elements
a treatment for what ailed him
halfway through his life.
The lithium cups that you drank water from,
crystals of your insides,
if the ghost of you was neither stalk
nor stem, bird nor beast, but sat staring at me
with all its feelings,
buried below one surface of plastic
and another of bedrock, still
I could feel your collar in my hand
the imprint like a line palm
burning inside of mine
and as it became fall again
I forgot there would never be another start
to missing you.
Every year I will take off
from here. Everything I could have wanted
died with your death, and what
was left is a series of simple machines
insisting upon my insanity, my unwellness,
insisting if I am all right I must prove it
I must wear a yellow dress
to the embassy dinner
Here’s your one-a-day realization
that you’ve been writing about Anne Sexton
for more than half your life
and in spite of an overall acknowledgement
of some kind of primacy you can’t seem
to love Sylvia as much.
Anne held out only so much longer,
a different silhouette idling
in the garage, the exhaust snaked back
through the window, her Newton pool
full of leaves every autumn,
and the unfair shapes she contorted into,
asking her daughters to hold her there.
Every bit waving the wand, she said
I’m not going to spend my life researching
to see if I can get related to a Salem witch,
then, Does Cal Lowell still smoke Salems,
and the film crew taped her
reading a poem quote like a minister
so said the husband who kept her steady
through years of violent surf, and who sometimes
made the surf violent. She once said
he was a case like Willie Lohman only
more tragic and in parentheses added
(grey eyes) as if that explained
it all. We all know what makes
a person worse, the psychoanalyst
lumbering over to the sofa to join her,
his shadow covering her body
so completely that it’s no wonder
her other doctor said
she couldn’t get up again
after he’d weighed her down.
A doorway full of smoke,
the roll top garage pulling back
like a wave tautening until
it collapses on itself, all the poisoned air
pouring out to meet the sun
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