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.
The gulls on their wooden stilts at the tip of the bar miaowed like cats. Then they flapped up, one by one, in their ash-colored jackets, circling my head and crying.
I could not admit then, as I do now, the essential tragic fact: I love you with all my heart and soul and body; in your weakness as in your strength; and for me to love a man even in his weakness is something I have never all my life been able to do before.
You are a prisoner of sorts, and yet you have made yourself so.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,... I wanted each and everyone of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
I felt a bit awkward about the tears, but they were real enough.
I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
And then there are the many many times I have given myself to that fury and that death which is loving you, and I am, to my own knifing hurt, more faithful than is kind to my peace and my wholeness. I live in two worlds and as long as we are apart, I always shall.
Still, I imagined myself going to some Boston priest – it would have to be Boston, because I didn’t want any priest in my home town to know I’d thought of killing myself. Priests were terrible gossips.
Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?” “No, what?” I would say. “A piece of dust.” Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, “So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.
That being free. What would the dark Do without fevers to eat? What would the light Do without eyes to knife, what would he Do, do, do without me.
The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a foetus in a bottle.
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. After that – in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day – I had never been really happy again.
I have a lot to give someone, someday. But I must not be too Christian. I can only end up with one, and I must leave many lonely by the wayside. So that is all for now. Perhaps someday someone will leave me by the same idea. And that will be poetic justice...
They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture.
As I stared down at Constantin the way you stare down at a bright, unattainable pebble at the bottom of a deep well, his eyelids lifted and he looked through me, and his eyes were full of love. I watched dumbly as a shutter of recognition clicked across the blur of tenderness and the wide pupils went glossy and depthless as patent leather.
What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb,” I had told Doctor Nolan.
And yet I feel that sleep somehow.
Buddy’s father was a teacher, and I think Buddy could have been a teacher as well, he was always trying to explain things to me and introduce me to new knowledge.
Let me be strong, strong with sleep and strong with intelligence and strong with bone and fiber; let me learn, through this desperation, to spread myself out: to know where and to whom to give:.