Unquiet spirit, by what right
Do I come to disturb your dust
In this omniscient October light
A half century almost from the day
You tumbled down your library stairs
Into eternal night? By what right
Do I invade the dignity of your house,
Ransack the closets, shelves and drawers,
Measuring your dresses and jewelry,
Picturing you alive, challenging me?
I breathe deep, hoping a sweet scent
Of you, long breathless, might arise,
Some stray atom of your spirit meant
For mine alone. We are not so different
Maybe—man, woman, alive or dead,
Souls confronting the inarticulate.
I come to write your life, a ghoulish trade—
Like others of my time and not like you
Who made a fortune making Fortune rhyme.
To make my living I must turn to prose.
This is what has brought me to your house,
Gardens, letters, grave and diary.
And really, if you didn’t want biography,
Why do you preserve all of this stuff,
Your books, shoes and teacups, lingerie,
A hat made from a peacock, golden coat
Cut from a lion or an ocelot?
The fiery swirl of hair clipped from your head
In childhood to make tresses for a doll;
The doll itself! Sits staring, cracked and bald
Above the bureau where the hair is kept,
The relic of a goddess, wrapped
In tissue, the red hair that drove men mad,
Made them write love letters by the yard,
Pleading, jealous, tormented by need.
You kept them all. Had you no regard
For the dignity of the dead, no modesty?
Did you mean to burn them before you died?
I want to think you left the hoard for me,
Calling me to bring you back to life,
Dangerous, voluptuous, green-eyed:
Better a poet, moonlighting biography,
Than a shrunken scholar, deaf to prosody.
I want to believe it. But who am I
To climb this wooded hill
Along an overgrown, untrodden trail,
To touch the gravestone planted in
The earth that owns your ashes still,
Joined with your husband, your true love,
Here in this mountain laurel grove?
You are not here. And I’m vexed with questions.
The world was yours: beauty, love and fame,
The gift of speech, moments of ecstasy,
Money and men, houses, horses, land.
Why, Edna, were you never satisfied?
Can I write what I cannot understand?
I have yet to check the one-room shack
Where you wrote a libretto and a book
Of verse before your beauty and your art
Gave in to gin, morphine, and despair.
Heart pounding, I loose the rusted lock.
Nothing here but a table and chair,
An iron wood-stove and a wind-up clock
On the windowsill, faded, vague with dust,
Whose hands were tied one autumn afternoon
Or early morning fifty years ago.
At last! Is this the sign I begged for, some
Sympathetic magic, a poet’s trick?
Across the timeless space I hear the rhythm;
The clock, true as a heart, begins to tick.
Now you tell me what you learned too late:
True joy, like genius, is a grace
To nurture, bring to blossom and bear fruit
In its own season. Thundering ecstasy
Always may be bought for the right price
Of wine or the poppy, sex or poetry.
Death to the soul that cannot see
The difference. Lightning blasts the house
Built to be the home for happiness.
