because brightness
invites
transparency, I guess.
Then a little boat
to hospital smells.
Doctors called
the forest cancer,
not obscuring leaves.
and you a boy.
You say:
“Why can’t people use the word
courage?
instead of something
vulgar and idiomatic
about manhood?”
Courage, I say,
is you,
Max.
In your wild suit
your small boat
and terrible forest
a man overnight
no boy
could ever scale those walls.
You come home
and dinner is waiting,
still waiting, I hope, still warm.
*
And today my small boy
learned to swim.
He said: the water held me, Mama.
It held me.
AUGUST 8
Speechless.
Love,
Max
AUGUST 8
Dear Max,
I hope it was not too intrusive.
Speechless can mean one of two things . . . but I trust you divined my intention.
I’m thinking of you as you go into a difficult week.
Just back from thirty-six hours in Disneyland.
Oy.
Tony sends his best and enjoyed meeting you.
Please put us on your list to let us know how the surgery went, even if it’s a one-sentence email.
xoxo,
Sarah
AUGUST 8
No no no! Speechless only in the direction that it is one of the more moving things to happen to me in a while. You discern me, honor me—I just can’t . . .—just have to hold the poem up.
Disneyland is very disorienting, isn’t it?
I loved meeting your family, all of your children have a kind of calm joy in them that I think you put there. Or maybe Tony. Tony’s a doll.
Hell starts on Monday: it’ll be three days of pretty constant scanning (and I’m a little afraid of MRI machines) and that’ll transition immediately into surgery. Then I’ll get to rest and probably lose some weight.
X
Max
AUGUST 9
Thank you, dear Max. I’m very glad you liked it.
I’m a little afraid of MRI machines too. I don’t know why they haven’t figured out how to make them more pleasant. If we can put a man on the moon . . .
Okay, thinking of you, sending you all good thoughts . . .
(When I went into labor, my mantra was from The Little Engine That Could, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can . . .”)
xoxo,
Sarah
Part Two:
New York, 2013–15.
Or,
“Where to get a good pancake in this dump of a city?”
That fall, Max moved to New York and entered Columbia’s MFA program in poetry. He wrote poems like water while undergoing chemotherapy.
Our letters now take on the familiar quality of spontaneous logistical wrangling because we saw each other more often—they are more in the vein of:
From me: “I know you like Halloween. We are having a Halloween party if you want to hang out with kids and see spooky movies.” And from Max: “OooOOO Halloween party.” Then small missives about my kids: “Spent Halloween with my William and his best pal Annabel, both dressed as Peter Pan, shouting: ‘Pixie dust away!’ And running down the street.” There would be invitations, like “Do you want tickets to my play?” And from Max: “Read a poem with me at my poetry reading on Thirteenth Street?” Or, from me: “Want to eat this weird mushroom soup that is supposed to help with lung cancer? I’ll go to Chinatown and buy the mushrooms and cook it.” Or: “Send me poems! I’m driving around in a minivan with three kids so need poems like water.” Or, from Max: “What is a hinky-pinky for Infinite-Rainbow Guitar Pick?” “Spectrum Plectrum.” (Hinky-Pinky is a rhyming game I played when I was little.) Or, quite often, from me: “The kids all have strep, I have to reschedule.”
I was busy, in and out of rehearsals for various projects. Conversations with Max were more often in real time over a meal and not in letters. They went something like this, over a slice of pizza:
SARAH:
How did it go to read your poetry out loud last night?
MAX:
It was good, it was nice, it was good of them to ask me. One poet read a poem and I said, “It’s funny, I can’t quite hear what you’re trying to get across because
