oheunoia (original) (raw)

1
Once before I tried to tell you
about the incinerator. Last summer
while I was living in the hot
city. All day long at the theatre
would flash in my mind this thing
and that thing too, but usually
that heavy cave where there were
no flames bothered me And I
could not tell you, Bunny, then:
there was always my spiral
staircase and the diamond pattern
of the well, the eerie sound of
a quiet house, le Boeuf sur le Toit
and friends who would fight and
would not kill anyone silently.

2
Now, as if this had bothered me ever
since, I find the words are at the
front of my mind. The incinerator
is clearly horrible, soundless, cold.
I went there too often with those things
dear to us both: the tinsels and the
velvets of the stage, the broken sets
and used drapes and tattered scrims,
and they were not consigned to
any glorious or at least bright
immolation. Just a clean dump. Do
you wonder it’s bothered me? you
don’t, we troupers in private know
all about carnival gestures. Before,
I wrote, “it’s grey and monstrous” which
is false, and fumbled after “hints of
mysticism” or “death’s shrewdnesses,”
all notions, all collections of sentiment
that make a poem another burner full of
junk. You enable me, by your least
remark, to unclutter myself, and my
nerves thank you for not always laughing.

3
But I still fear to mention the blue
flowers. They scared me most and I
prolong other talk. There were fields of
them around the place, all blue, all
innocent. The artificial is always innocent.
They looked hand-made, fast-dyed, paper.
They nodded ominously in the sun, right
up to the edge of the concrete ramp, a
million killing abstractions, a romantic
absence of meaning, a distorted prettiness
so thorough that my own eyes rolled up
in fear for their identity and I involuntarily
cried at the thought of tiny mirrors where
the object is lost irretrievably in its own
repetition. Is this how beauty accompanies
fear so it can escape us? Do you think these
flowers could be auctioned tintypes or souls
outside hell? Is blue what they mean by
“shun posterity” and “the price of fame” and
“fear of death”? Have I learned it wrong?

4
When anyone reads this but you it begins
to be lost. My voice is sucked into a thousand
ears and I don’t know whether I’m weakened.
Bunny, when I ran to you in the summer
night and upset us both it was mostly this,
though you thought I was going away. See?
I’m away now, but I’m here. And even if the
rose has been ruined for all of us by religion
we don’t accept these blue flowers. The sun
and the rain glue things together that are not
at all similar, and we are not taken in
by the nearness, the losses, or the cold.
Be always my heroine and flower. Love, Frank.