Next poem I want to read it's a poem
that I wrote for Robert Lowell, whom I didn't know,
but one night I was thinking about him.
I had finished Killing Floor and I
was thinking about confessional poetry
and I was thinking about Plath too at the time,
and what a trap that confessional poetry can be,
and then I thought, well, why don't you try it.
I was damning it, but at the same time I
thought, why don't you try?
Because I never write anything about myself.
So I got about four lines in and it seemed to me
that I felt this presence from the top of my head to my toes
and it was Robert Lowell, and I just
crossed out those four lines and have this poem.
This is called Conversation.
We smile at each other and I lean back
against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead?
I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers,
and when you open your mouth a ball of yellow light
falls to the floor and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say.
I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start, wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident, so inconsequential you barely
notice it,
your fingers graze that dress and you
hear the sound of a knife cutting paper, you see it too
and you realize how that image is simply
the extension of another image?
That your own life is a chain of words that one day will snap?
Words, you say, young girls in a circle
holding hands and beginning to rise
heavenward like white helium balloons
in their confirmation dresses,
the wreaths of flowers on their heads
spinning, and above all that, that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like,
only 10 times clearer, 10 times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?