place.
Behind your back. My body. Stop the air.
Travel by stopping, full stop, just there.
As lee is a small word. Sail easy.
Lee and unlee, light is hot.
Rest here, a while longer on my
belly. A lee, a dry derry, a drought.
August: marsh sounds, marsh looks, a ferry.
Look for other words—lucid, pellucid—
call a mind a pond? Call a pond a mind?
Lucid, penitent mendicants on a pond.
Words for clarity, words for light and heat,
words for charity—words for sleep.
FEBRUARY 17
Sarah, I know I’m poetry biased, but this made me shimmer inside. I want to write with this kind of glow, and this kind of penetration/purity (and intelligence) one day. I have read it out loud so many times. I am going to use sounds. I am going to read out loud more, and have words fall back into one another and into one another’s arms!
The first stanza . . . makes me want to play peekaboo. I can’t even. It’s moving—I want to move. I want this miracle in my life. . . . The elisions. The life. Oh God, Sarah, seriously that first stanza I could read a billion times.
I’m excited for socks, and for dinner.
Love,
Max
FEBRUARY 17
Oh, Max. Thank you so much. I will keep sending you little poems then. Maybe you will give me the courage to send them out one day. I’m terribly private about them. In some ways, you know, you are my teacher, not the other way around.
Socks and dinner soon! And how was your poetry reading?
All good thoughts sent to you,
Sarah
FEBRUARY 20
Dear Sarah,
The reading went fabulously—full of loved ones. I have connected with some other poets and they say they want me to come to Brooklyn to do a reading. Maybe you could come to one! (Some of the other poems were a little deliberately and finicky opaque . . .)
The next day I went to Louise [Glück]’s house and we hashed over some editing I did and some new work. It’s basically me shedding portention and allowing the poem to be a humbler thing than I wanted it to be, but still a thing that I can be proud of.
I’m exhausted from the chemo this week, and have spent lots of time fearing the upcoming scans. So many uncertainties. There’s talk of a stem cell transplant which would involve even more heinous levels of chemotherapeutic dosing than I’ve ever experienced. And then I could relapse within two months. I’m bitter, Sarah, I’m bitter and love the world and it won’t love me back.
Missing you,
Max
FEBRUARY 20
Dearest Max,
I’m so glad your reading went well.
Oh, and on the school of poets who surround you, I say: resist opacity. I think at the heart of opacity is fear. I think ultimately it was a similar experience I had when I was your age that made me wander away from poetry; that is to say, the poetry that was privileged at college was opaque and academic and my transparency was hugely embarrassing.
I’m going to save your poem for my Amtrak ride to New Haven today. And I’ll send you another poem soon. But for today, a song!
I hope you don’t have to go through the labor of a stem cell transplant. I want everything good for you. Love, health, poetry.
Okay, Dora is almost over on the television, I must go attend to the twins.
xo,
Sarah
The song I sent him was from Melancholy Play: a chamber musical. It goes like this, set to music:
TILLY:
Do you ever have the feeling, when you wake up in the morning, that you’re in love but you don’t know with what?
It’s this feeling—
that you want to love strangers,
that you want to kiss the man at the post-office,
or the woman at the dry-cleaners—
you want to wrap your arms around life, life itself
but you can’t
and this feeling wells up
and there is nowhere to put this
great happiness—
and you’re floating—and then you’re falling—
and then you have to lie down on the couch.
FRANCES: (simultaneously) JOAN:
Are you still in therapy Tilly? I know what you mean.
FEBRUARY 26
Sarah:
A proper note.
Melancholy Play in this song form is confusing and beautiful—the bricolage of musical intonations gives it a dizzy interpersonal body. It’s like how I imagine people engaged with opera when it was part of daily life. (I can’t follow operas the way I imagine they deserve to be followed, and this makes me feel like I get an opera-like experience—free from the overconventionalization of musicals but complicated in a register I can intuitively relate to.) Please send me more, and more poems. (Still love your poems best.)
The stomach holds up today, the flu seems to be in check. I don’t even want to talk about my physical health if I’m able to focus on anything else for two seconds in a row. I sense a wall from D. and I can’t blame her, I haven’t spoken to her in years, and all of a sudden I’m barging very suddenly and cancerily into her presence. We had a meal where she seemed to be obliging me. She called me “dude” at one point. Sarah, can you imagine anyone referring to me as “dude”? Urgh.
I am writing fairly good poems. More exciting has been the editing. Opacity
