Fragile Magnets Deborah Marie Poe It becomes her. What I mean is the costume she wears, what she calls high modernism. Hilda Doolittle. Her hair slicked back with coconut oil I can smell when she leans in to laugh, to hand Brandon and I her strange open Chinese fabric box with poetry inside. Each one of us is allowed one poem. It is folded haphazardly, and stapled. The staples are bright, hot pink. I have not met her before though I have seen her name. There is something about her. A matchbox. An orange slice. A lemon under the tongue. I am this way for her too. She looks at me, at moments like the north pole looks to south. She is trying to issue1 why the circles under my eyes are so dark. She sees someone healthy when I smile. * That night the red wine chez moi, the daydreams of Ezra pinning back my hair, the rapidly etched words on the Japanese calendar paper left from our trip. Only there was no Ezra, so it was only my words, not his circus-tent noises adding to my night. Only red wine. And my sea violets. My sea garden. My anemones. Fragile agates. When I met this young poet, I was suddenly older. Not old, mind you, older. Fourteen years to be exact. A young poet’s tugging. We exchanged ages. I’m sure I brought it up. And ages pounded through me. I recognized the slate grey expanse in the eyes. Like my sea garden, they were green. * Earlier tonight I was in the emergency room. It was my second time in the last three weeks. I was flicking my matches out the car window on the way. When I got there, stoned, no one knew. When the medicine is there, it’s there. A woman had cut her arm, she was there alone, and she read Reader’s Digest like the Torah. A guy, younger than me, was cracked out. Nervous, his foot articulating the ache. His knee up and down. I wanted to grab and stop him. I start writing again. I’m working on this poem. I have to do this, to write, or else I lose it, my mind and the words. The nurse asks me for my insurance information at which point I tell her she’s interrupted my process. She apologizes, and I laugh. * Freud knew that what we call madness and what we call inspiration come from the same source. I should like this feeling. More than any silver spoon. Or teacup. The orange slices of sun sipping me for breakfast that morning. Or the shower of black umbrellas I imagined under then slate-grey electric skies, pulling hazard to the ground. I wanted to reach out to the swift sky, to say “come beautiful rain, beautiful rain, welcome.” I want no barrier between myself and the earth. If I could break him, I could break a tree. * When she gives me her number, she says “We shall talk poetry.” Brandon isn’t sure about her and wonders about her motives. It is almost midnight, and in the back room, we are smoking pot, and she comes in to say goodbye. Nikki persuades her to rest for a moment. You can see she doesn’t smoke often. It affects her almost immediately. When she smokes, she sucks with her mouth I imagine younger. Murmuring “this is why I shouldn’t smoke pot,” she comes to the edge of the bed where Brandon and I are sitting next to each other. And she leans in closer, closer to my mouth. She leaves, and Brandon laughs. I tell him he has it wrong. * My head is trampled coral. Last night blows through me like sea grass. Freud was wrong, wrong, wrong. Why conflate insanity with language. Does it have to be a slippery negative? The image of the young man with the circles under his eyes slips through like Annie’s long hair. Shall I apologize, dear Freud, for my gestures of kindness? Would you call it penis envy? Mysteries remain, after all, to swirl in these unknowns. This is what kisses mean. * I open my eyes, and the clock beside my pillow says 4am. A stomach is on its backward cycle, and mother is too far away. With my mother it is complicated. When she brings the medicine, she comes with her dog-heeling boyfriend who acts like someone’s got his balls in their fist and is squeezing so tight he can’t speak. I doubt very seriously he knows what to do with someone sick. Tonight Brandon stayed with his girlfriend. I roll over and see Hilda’s number. I pick up the phone. It’s 4am. * I am dreaming of Ezra. In the dream phone call, he admonishes me, tells me I’m moving within the same boundaries. I need to swim out of them. He is talking about the snake in his toilet that has crawled out to parrot his mutterings. As he’s speaking the phone keeps ringing. I wake and look at the clock. After 4am. It’s Brandon’s friend. It’s Ariel. Ariel, I was dreaming of Ezra. * I saw your number on the floor—need a ride. * Rubbing my eyes I put on my goulashes, my dark green pants, and my un-ironed white shirt and lock my apartment behind me. I can hear Ezra warning me one of these days I will learn. I am too sensitive, too something. Too open. Unable to say no. The way Ezra’s mixed messages stick like moisture. A gaze. A focus. Pan and zoom. How I long for that Spanish water to dive into. The memory of San Sebastian locks my apartment behind me. * My stomach is an African ant uprising. I imagine the earth is my stomach, and the ants are making their way through me, eating everything in sight. Is it too much to ask, just to rest? * Annie would do the same. I knock on the door, and he comes. * My eyes are open in the third ward of the west wing of a hospital. Rat in a cage. My eyes search for language, but I can not squeeze the light from between the swelling words. I squeeze my eyes tighter and then open them wide. I smell and taste sulpher. There is a train, the sound of it passing, it is barreling towards Albany. I believe everyone is sleeping except for the engineer who is barreling across the snow which is light and an endless sea of sleeping swans. Wind, rend, cut, rend, tatters. Hilda mutters like a spell. * Ezra, what would you do? What would you have me do? I am unsure when his mother will arrive. He wakes, and we talk of poetry. His music and mine. I tell him when he wakes that his eyes are like Annie’s. I tell him of Annie, and he nods and smiles. There are dark circles under my eyes. I ask him if he’s gotten what he’s looked for in writing and art. Yes, he says, it has unwrapped itself like foil and wrapped itself around his windpipe. He is a child in a gown. I imagine his mother driving with a cigarette hanging out the window. Her boyfriend is sleeping. It smells like upstate New York, moist, and it does not smell like the sea. Night has tricked itself into the room, outside it is snowing, the snow is thick on the branches, and the golden light of the street lights holds the large flakes aching for the ground. I push the hair back from his head, and I kiss his forehead. In my mind I have wandered east and west, wandered through the anemones, somehow still breathing. What do I tell him? What wisdom? At least Freud showed me something. How do I prepare the boy? I am a gatepost, wrought iron and long. I am the hell-hazed street lamp. Or only a fixture, another structure in the room. The consistent smell of a hospital has always made me faint. When I lean into him, his hair smells a sweet smoke. His eyes are green like my sea garden. Fragile as an agate. The nurse has come in, and with her lime-green-silence, she is gone. His mother is not here. I step out of my shoes. I climb in next to him. Hold. He is the edge of a mist where salmon wait their day. The whitewashed room is keen and sharp. Notes Acknowledgement is made to H.D.’s poetic impulses which can be heard throughout the piece.