Willow Street, poetical address.

Number nine, even better. It confirmed

We had to have it. We got it.

A tower of the Muses. Freed from school

For the first time in your life, this was the cage

Your freedom flew to – a view of the Charles River

And Cambridge beyond it. Over my table

I covered the windows with brown paper,

Pushed ear-plugs in on my inflamed nerves

And sank. In the other room,

Perched up in the glare, on the cliff-edge,

You hammered your new Hermes,

Your Panic Bird chipping at the old egg,

While I rolled in my sack, with my lumber,

Along the bottom of the Charles. We huddled. Me

In my black sack striking sulphur matches

To find the eyes of Jung’s nigredo. You

In a paralysis of terror-flutters

I hardly understood. I folded

Black wings round you, wings of the blackness

That enclosed me, rocking me, infantile,

And enclosed you with me. And your heart

Jumped at your ribs, you gasped for air.

You grabbed for the world,

For straws, for your morning coffee – anything

To get airborne. My bubbles

Wobbled upwards and burst emptily

In the reverberations of the turbines

Home and College had assembled in you,

That thundered the parquet

And shook you to tremblings. Your day

Was twenty-four rungs of a fire-escape

Hanging in ghastly swirls, over nothing,

Reaching up towards nothing.

What an airy Hell!

                                  Boston clanged

All its atoms below, through all its circles

Between Harvard and Scollay Square. Alone

Either of us might have met with a life.

Siamese-twinned, each of us festering

A unique soul-sepsis for the other,

Each of us was the stake

Impaling the other. We struggled

Quietly through the streets, affirming each other,

Dream-maimed and dream-blind.

                                                             Your typewriter,

Your alarm clock, your new sentence

Tortured you, a cruelty computer

Of agony niceties, daily afresh –

Every letter a needle, as in Kafka.

While I, like a poltergeist fog,

Hung on you, fed on you – heavy, drugged

With your nightmares and terrors. Inside your Bell Jar

I was like a mannikin in your eyeball.

What happened casually remains –

Strobes of a hallucinating fever

In some heaving dimension of chemical horror.

Our only escape was into arms

That reached upwards or reached downwards

And rolled us all night eastward with each other

Over the bottom, in the muddy current.

What a waste!

What did our spectre-blinded searching reach

Or wake to, that was worth it?

                                                       Happiness

Appeared – momentary,

Peered in at your window

Like a wild migrant, an oriole,

A tanager, a humming-bird – pure American,

Blown scraps of the continent’s freedom –

But off course and gone

Before we could identify it.

It took me a dizzy moment to make out

Something under the chestnuts, struggling

On a path of the Common, down near the Swan-boats.

What looked like a slug, black, soft, wrinkled,

Was wrestling, somehow, with the fallen

Brown, crumpled lobe of a chestnut leaf.

Suddenly, plainly, it was a bat.

A bat fallen out of its tree

Mid-afternoon. A sick bat? I stooped

Thinking I’d lift it again to tree-bark safety.

It reared up on its elbows and snarled at me,

A raving hyena, the size of a sparrow,

Its whole face peeled in a snarl, fangs tiny.

I tried to snatch it up by the shoulders

But it spun, like a fighter, behind its snarl.

At home I looked at the blood, and remembered:

American bats have rabies. How could Fate

Stage a scenario so symbolic

Without having secreted the tragedy ending

And the ironic death? It confirmed

The myth we had sleepwalked into: death.

This was the bat-light we were living in: death.