Читать книгу Letters from Max - Sarah Ruhl - Страница 46

JULY 30

Dearest Max,

I love your poem. Thank you so much for writing it, and for sharing it with me.

I am very honored to have a Max poem dedicated to me, you know. I love it.

I wasn’t sure about the last stanza, somehow it reminded me of T. S. Eliot as a gesture towards something oracular or multivocal in italics, and something about your poem was more intimate. I suppose I wondered if the idea of hating yourself to create heaven needed a rebuttal, or another articulation, rather than moving into the abstract at the very end.

Something about the ordinary scene of washing dishes with one’s mother . . . it’s very beautiful, Max.

With your round of chemo done are you still immunosuppressed? Wonder if you’d like to see the kids or if they would still be too germy. Could be fun to go to the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or something. Or Tony’s old kid playground.

I wrote a poem the other day that reminds me slightly of some of the questions you are posing. It’s funny how mundane the impulse for a poem can be. In my case, I got a bad burn making cheesy grits, of all things! Pathetic kitchen accident!

Consider the beauty of a horse.

Consider the beauty of a foot.

Then:

Consider a blister. From a burn.

How it covers the skin while it heals.

Consider its ugliness and how it

Hides the promise of new skin.

Then:

Consider the fact of considering.

Considerate children, and considerate beasts.

And then:

How can one want to leave this earth?

With its horses, feet, ugliness, and thought—

all of its terrible regeneration?