style="font-size:15px;"> trees.
The vines are white and fall apart in my hands,
as if dissolved under the tongue.
Every living thing is screaming dust.
To imagine a heaven is to admit
there are things in this
world you think you could never bring yourself to love,
even given an unlimited number of attempts.
“Learn to love everything—the world becomes heaven.”
“That sounds hard: I have a better idea, pass the soap.”
I tell you now,
unhappily knitted to bravery,
that all you must do
is hate yourself
round and round,
hand in hand, foaming mouth open,
rainbow bubbles dashing open.
Hate yourself more
than any other thing:
you have made heaven.
Heaven’s Proverb:
When your milk Finally spills,
may it feed the toxic white slug
impaled by the heel
of the tyrant’s loose sandal.
JULY 30
Dearest Max,
I love your poem. Thank you so much for writing it, and for sharing it with me.
I am very honored to have a Max poem dedicated to me, you know. I love it.
I wasn’t sure about the last stanza, somehow it reminded me of T. S. Eliot as a gesture towards something oracular or multivocal in italics, and something about your poem was more intimate. I suppose I wondered if the idea of hating yourself to create heaven needed a rebuttal, or another articulation, rather than moving into the abstract at the very end.
Something about the ordinary scene of washing dishes with one’s mother . . . it’s very beautiful, Max.
With your round of chemo done are you still immunosuppressed? Wonder if you’d like to see the kids or if they would still be too germy. Could be fun to go to the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or something. Or Tony’s old kid playground.
I wrote a poem the other day that reminds me slightly of some of the questions you are posing. It’s funny how mundane the impulse for a poem can be. In my case, I got a bad burn making cheesy grits, of all things! Pathetic kitchen accident!
Consider the beauty of a horse.
Consider the beauty of a foot.
Then:
Consider a blister. From a burn.
How it covers the skin while it heals.
Consider its ugliness and how it
Hides the promise of new skin.
Then:
Consider the fact of considering.
Considerate children, and considerate beasts.
And then:
How can one want to leave this earth?
With its horses, feet, ugliness, and thought—
all of its terrible regeneration?
JULY 26
Dear Sarah,
More on your poem in a little bit. I want to ask you about your process—you produce things that are so alive and flexible and bamboo-like.
JULY 29
Dear Max,
I don’t know much about my process except that it involves tea.
Love,
Sarah
Max, at this point, had left New Haven, and was shuttling between his mother’s home in Los Angeles and treatments in New York at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Summers often have me visiting my in-laws in Los Angeles. On my family trip to California that summer, we all went to have sushi in the Valley. My husband, Tony; my three kids; Max; and me. Max joked that the only way to get him to drive to the Valley was to see my family.
My oldest daughter, Anna, who was about seven at the time, adored Max. Children were drawn to Max because he was playful and empathetic, and didn’t care about grown-up social mores.
At lunch, Max looked very skinny. Frightened. We did not go to a Ferris wheel. It seemed like too much.
I remember that summer my twins were three years old. It was the summer they learned to swim.
AUGUST 6
Dear Max,
I was so happy to see you. Even though the happiness was tempered by what you’re going through.
I wrote a poem for you while I was filling the bathtub up with water tonight and when I finished the water had almost overflowed but didn’t. It is attached. (The poem, not the bathwater.)
Take heart, take courage, you’re very brave.
xo,
Sarah
FOR MAX
With thanks to Maurice Sendak
Death no wild thing
and you a boy,
Max.
One night in your room
(or body)
a forest grew
and the walls
