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The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. |
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Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in |
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I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly |
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As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these
hands. |
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5 |
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. |
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I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
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And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
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They have propped my head between the pillow and the
sheet-cuff |
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Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. |
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10 |
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. |
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The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, |
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They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
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Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
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So it is impossible to tell how many there are. |
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15 |
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water |
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Tends to the
pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. |
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They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me
sleep. |
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Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage - |
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My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, |
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20 |
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; |
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Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. |
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I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat |
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Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. |
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They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. |
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25 |
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley |
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I watched my tea set, my bureaus of linen, my books |
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Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. |
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I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. |
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I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted |
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30 |
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. |
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How free it is, you have no idea how free - |
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The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, |
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And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. |
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It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them |
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35 |
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. |
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The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
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Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe |
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Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
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Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. |
|
40 |
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me
down, |
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Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
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A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. |
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Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. |
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The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me |
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45 |
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
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And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow |
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Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, |
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And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. |
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The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. |
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50 |
Before they came the air was calm enough, |
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Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. |
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Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. |
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Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
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Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. |
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55 |
They concentrate my attention, that was happy |
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Playing and resting without committing itself. |
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The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. |
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The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
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They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
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60 |
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes |
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Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. |
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The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, |
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And comes from
a country far away as health. |
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