Suite for Emily

1. The Letter

Everywhere the windows give up nothing

but frost’s intricate veined foliage.

Just engines shrilling pocked and frozen streets

wailing toward some new disaster.

No bright angels’ ladders going to split

heaven this Chicago instant where the pier’s

an iced fantastic: spiked, the glacial floes

seize it greedy like a careless treasure—

marquise diamonds, these round clear globes, the psychic’s

crystal world spinning in her corner shop

when I passed, a globe boundaried with turning

silent winds and demons. Out here the pavement’s

a slick graffitied strip: There’s more to life

than violence. Someone’s added Yes, Sex and Drugs.

Hello, Plague Angel. I just heard your wings

hiss off the letter on my table—Emily’s

in prison again, her child’s lost to the State,

Massachusetts. Fatigue, pneumonia,

the wasting away. In the secret hungering,

the emptiness when we were young would come

the drug’s good sweep like nothing else,

godly almost the way we’d float immune

& couldn’t nothing touch us, nothing.

Somehow I’d thought you’d pass her over—

positive yes—but never really sick,

that flayed above her door there’d be some sign

of mercy. But there’s only January’s

rough ministry peeling my face away.

Light like the cruel light of another century

& I’m thinking of Dickinson’s letter,

“Many who were in their bloom have gone

to their last account and the mourners go about

the streets.” The primer pages yellowing

on her shelf beneath an album of pressed gentian:

“Do most people live to be old? No, one half die

before they are eight years old. But one in four lives

to see twenty-one.” She’d known the bitter sponge

pressed to the fevered forehead, the Death Angel’s

dark familiar company, how she’d swirl her veils,

how she’d lean over the ewer and basin

blackening the water. This arctic water, this

seething rustle—lamé, sequins, a glitter wrap

trailing from a girl’s shoulders so the shadow pimps

go hey princess, why you so sad tonight,

let me make you happy, when she’s only tired,

up all night & needing a hit to let her sleep.

We know that story, the crest and billow

& foam and fleeting fullness

before the disappearing. Discs of hissing ice,

doors you (I?) might fall through to the underworld

of bars & bus stations, private rooms of

dancing girls numb-sick & cursing the wilderness

of men’s round blank faces. Spinning demons.

Round spoon of powder hissing over the flame.

Worlds within worlds, beneath worlds, worlds that flare

and consume so they become the only world.

2. Holy City, City of Night

What is that general rule which tells

how long a thing will live? The primer answers,

Whatever grows quick decays quick: soon ripe,

soon rotten. The rust-blown calla gracing

my table, those Boston girls 20 years gone,

young men in lace & glitter washed alien

by gasoline sunsets, the burning sphere

lapsing below night’s black rim. Live fast, die. . .

we know the rest. Reckless anthem.

The pier cable’s ice-sleeved beneath

my hands—miraculous, yes, to be here

januaried by this lake’s barbaric winterscape

Dickinson might read as savage text

& emblem of a deity indifferent. Her embassy lay

beyond the city of jasper & gold, the beaten

wrought towers scripture promised the saved

would enter. What heaven she found she made.

And so did we, worlds that sear, consume—earthly,

delirious. Ignis fatuus. Strike the match,

the fizzing cap. But Oh Reader, the wild beauty

of it, the whirring rush, blond hiss of aerial

miles, worn stairways in every burning school

of nodding classrooms, the buzz-snap of

talk blurring hallucinatory fraught

avenues. Illusive inner city, drugged

majestic residence spiraled with staircases,

balustrades rococoed, lapidary. Invisible empires

dreamt beneath the witchery of birds

circling the Common with twilight, their caw

& settle, the patterns as they wheel

over the pond’s reflective mirror bruised

roseate, violet, deeper, the swanboats

darkening into night’s charged dazzle,

Park Square joints gone radiant, the bus station

burnished before the zap, the charge, the edge.

It was the life, wasn’t it? Compatriots you’d

just love to die for, who’d jump you

in a New York minute. But the glory

as the lights went up, torching the air chartreuse,

lipsticked pink, casting embers, seraphic fires

fallen earthward. Fallen, the furious emblems.

We were so young we’d spend & spend

ourselves as if there’d be no reckoning, then grew

past caring. All the darkening chapters.

Dream time, the inner time

where towers and battlements erect

their coruscating glamour & how we’d glide,

celebrities among them, the crowds falling back,

dream deeper, gone & wake to daylight’s assault

knocking another bare room, the alley, the bathroom

you inhabit like the thief you are. Ignis fatuus.

I can follow you there, Emily, we girls

setting out a thousand ruined nights in the splendor

of the torched & reckless hour.

Who wouldn’t trade heaven for that fleet city

when winter beaks the shattered pane,

when summer’s a nauseous shimmmer

of sexual heat, though sex is a numb machine

you float above? When the place you walk into

is a scream in the shape of yourself.

When it makes perfect sense to blow someone away

for 20 bucks beyond even your bleak human universe.

When the only laughter that falls down

is iron & godless. Here, I—the one who left—

must falter where persists

this chrome traffic shrill, where the cable’s

bitter alloy comes away in my hand,

this metaled pungence of hair and skin

in wind persists riven as the taste of myself,

the blood blooming healthy,

real in my mouth, a future’s lavish venues

spread stunned before me. These hands.

3. Combat Zone/War Stories

The district’s been demolished, sown with salt.

The dazzling girls, girls, girls in platinum wigs

have been lifted away by some infernal agency,

the queens, exotic Amazons & rough-trade gay boys.

Sometimes I go back to walk the streets all shops

and swank hotels, the office blocks & occasional

burnt-out shell. So American, this destruction

& renewal, cities amnesiac where evening’s

genesis falls through vast deserted silences,

towers grown otherworldly with light

thrown starlike from some alien world. Gone the Show Bar,

the Mousetrap, the whole gaudy necklace

of lacquer-dark underground lounges, halls

of mirrors, music billowing dancers

clean out of themselves beyond the dead-faced tricks,

the sick voyeurs. The Combat Zone. I can map it

in my mind, some parallel world, the ghost city

beneath the city. Parallel lives, the ones

I didn’t choose, the one that kept her.

In all that dangerous cobalt luster

where was safety? Home? When we were delirium

on rooftops, the sudden thrill of wind dervishing

cellophane, the shredded cigarettes. We were

the dust the Haitians spit on to commemorate

the dead, the click & slurried fall of beads

across a doorway. In the torn & watered silk

of night, the Zone exploded its shoddy neon orchid

to swallow us in the scent of fear, emergency,

that oily street perfume & weeping brick.

Gossamer clothes, summertime and leaning

against the long dusty cars, cruising siren songs.

Summer? My memory flutters—had I—was there summer?

Dancer, and floor, and cadence

quite gathered away, and I a phantom, to you

a phantom, rehearse the story.

And now it’s autumn turning hard to winter,

Thanksgiving, 1990, & all she wants is sweets

so it’s apple pie barehanded & Emily’s

spinning war stories, how bad she is: So, I say,

go ahead and shoot me, put me out of my misery.

Cut me motherfucker—my blood’s gonna kill you.

Then she’s too tired to sit & in the blue

kaleidoscopic TV shift I stroke

her hair, the ruined hands. I didn’t know

how sick I was—if the heroin wanted the AIDS,

or if the disease wanted the heroin. She asks me

to line up her collection of matchbox houses

so we can make a street, so we can make a neighborhood.

4. Jail, Flames—Jersey, 1971

The psychic’s globe whirls its winds: demons,

countless futures, the pasts. Only

thirteen the first time

I saw you in jail, just a kid looking

up at me, the usual grey detective clamor,

inkpads & sodium flash. Hauled out by the officials,

exemplary bad-news girl, they shoved

a lyric sheet at me. Command

recitation to sway you from straying.

“King Heroin,” James Brown pompadoured like nobody’s

business & here’s Death cartoonishly aloft on a white

winged horse, grim reaper lording it

over the shivering denizens

of a city, exaggerated as any Holy City,

going down, down, down. Just a kid, you, peering out

the jungle of your dark hair, greasy jeans, a tangle

of beads at your throat. Ludicrous,

I know, me declaiming within

the jail gleam that never sleeps all over us,

that effluvium of backed-up plumbing. On my palm,

the bar’s iron taint lingered for hours after.

It didn’t mean that much to me, seventeen,

my practiced sangfroid

chilling the terror, that long drop

inside, the way you collapse to fall in flames.

I might have said you’ll pay for the wild & reckless hour,

pay in the currency of sweat and shiver,

the future squandered, the course

of years reconfigured, relinquishment so

complete it’s more utter than any falling in love. Falling

instead in flames, burning tiles spiraling to litter

the courtyards of countless places that will

never be yours, the fingerprints,

tossed gloves & glittering costumes, flared

cornices & parapets, shattering panes, smoked out

or streaked with embers, the tinder of spools, such

a savage conflagration, stupid edge-game,

the way junkies tempt death,

over & over again, toy with it. I might have

told you that. Everything you ever meant to be, pfft,

out the window in sulphured matchlight, slow tinder

& strike, possession purely ardent as worship

& the scream working its way out

of your bones, demolition of wall & strut

within until you’re stark animal need. That is

love, isn’t it? Everything you meant to be falls

away so you dwell within a perfect

singularity, a kind of saint.

Pearl of great price. Majestic, searing,

the crystal globe spins futures unimaginable, that

crucible you know so well, Emily, viral fever refining

you to some essence of pain more furious

than these winter trees

stripped to black nerves above

the El’s streaked girders, a harsh equation, some

god’s iron laughter combing down time’s blind

& hush. Hush child, forgive me.

Twenty years later, you say

that night in jail you looked up

at me & wanted to be me. And I didn’t care.

5. Address

Hello Death Angel, old familiar, old nemesis.

In the deepest hours, I have recognized

your floating shape. I’ve seen your breath

seduce the torn curtain

masking the empty window, have crouched with you

in the doorway, curled in the alley

hooded in your essence & shadow, have

been left blue, heart-stopped

for yours, for yours. Death,

you are the bead in the raptor’s eye,

Death you dwell in the funneling depths

of the heavens beyond each

star’s keening shrill, Death you are the potion

that fills the vial, the night

the monuments have swallowed. You live

in the maimed child wrapped in a wreckage

of headlines. Death you center

in the fanged oval

of the prison dog’s howl. Death you dwell within

the necropolis we wake to in nightmare’s

hot electric wind. You glint

the edge of the boy’s razor,

patient in the blasted stairwell. Everywhere

you walk deep lawns, TVs pollinating air

with animals wired up to dance

for their food, with executions

& quiz shows. You’re in the column

of subway wind roaring before each

train’s arrival. I’ve seen you drape thoughtlessly

a woman’s hair over her face

as the shot carried her forward into stop-time

& beyond anything she’s laid

her money down for. Death your sliver works

swiftly through the bloodstream.

Hello Death Angel, Plague is your sister.

I’ve seen her handiwork, heard

the tortured breath, watched her loosen the hands

of the dazzling boys from each other.

For love, love. I’ve seen the AIDS hotels

& sick ones begging homeless

in the tunnels, the whispered conspiracies.

Shameless emissaries with your powders

& wands, your lunar carnivorous flowers.

Tricks, legerdemain. I’ve seen you draw

veined wings over the faces of sleepers,

the abandoned, the black feather that sweeps

so tenderly. I’ve seen the stain you scribe

on the pavement, the glossy canopy of leaves

you weave. I’ve seen waste & ruin, know

your kingdom for delirium, the furious thumbprints

you’ve scored on the flesh of those you choose.

I’ve seen you slow-dance in a velvet mask, dip

& swirl across dissolving parquet.

I’ve seen you swing open the iron gate—

a garden spired in valerian, skullcap, blue vervain.

Seen you stir in the neat half-moons, fingernails

left absently in a glazed dish.

Felons, I’ve cursed you in your greed, have spat

& wept then acquiesced in your wake. Without rue

or pity, you have marked the lintels & blackened

the water. Your guises multiply, bewildering

as the firmament’s careless jewelry.

Death I have welcomed you to the rooms

where Plague has lain when the struggle is passed

& lit the candles and blessed the ash.

Death you have taken my friends & dwell

with my friends. You are the human wage.

Death I am tired of you.

6. Dartmouth Women’s Prison, 1992

Emily, delirium’s your province.

You dwell feverish in prison

voiceless to plead

your need before the agencies

of government who cannot hear the buildings

falling & oil exploding, only people walking

& talking, cannon soft as velvet from parishes

that do not know you are burning up,

that seasons have rippled

like a beast the grasses beyond

the prison.

They cannot hear the strummed harp

or the nerves, black trees swaying winter,

cannot know your child is lost to you.

The human wage that’s paid & paid?

Once, we were two girls

setting out toward that city

of endless searing night, the route taking on

the intricacy, the fumes & bafflements

of a life a woman might dream turning

feverish in her prison bunk. Probation violation,

when broke & sick, no way home

from the clinic, the detective going

ride with me, just talk, that’s all

I want. Twenty bucks and him crowing

we just love to run you little sluts in.

Em, if I could reach you through the dust motes’

spinning, infernoed dreams, I would dwell

in the moon’s cool glistering

your cell, the rough cloth, the reflection

of your face given back in the steel basin’s

water, in the smooth moan of women loving women,

a cacophony of needs. I am there with you lost

in the chaos of numbers, that nattering P.A. buzz,

in the guards’ trolling clank & threat echoing

walls so eloquent

with all the high-frequency sizzle

of anguish they’ve absorbed.

Emily, I will bless your child, will

hold for you the bitter sponge,

would give you staff & orb, a firmament

radiant & free.

But these are phantoms, lies—

I cannot follow where you are. On my street,

the psychic’s crystal globe whirls pasts, futures

but where you are is timeless.

Pain—has an Element of Blank—It cannot recollect

when it Began—or if there were

a time when it was not—

It has no Future—but itself. . .

Off the lake a toothed wind keens

& it’s just me here, the one who’s left.

Just me helpless to change anything caught

in this ellipsis between traffic, this

fleet human delay, all around

the wind singing like a mechanical ballerina

a girl might hold in her hand, the one

that watched your childhood bed, porcelain

upturned gaze, stiff tutu, dust in the folds

of that spindly piercing music sounding

of voices winged over water, becoming

water, & gone.

7. A Style of Prayer

There is a prayer that goes Lord I am powerless

over these carnivorous streets, the fabulous

breakage, the world’s ceaseless perpetuum mobile,

like some renaissance design, lovely & useless

to harness the forces of weather, the planet’s

dizzy spin, this plague. A prayer that asks

where in the hour’s dark moil is mercy?

Ain’t no ladders tumbling down from heaven

for what heaven we had we made. An embassy

of ashes & dust. Where was safety? Home?

Is this love, staff, orb & firmament?

Parallel worlds, worlds within worlds—chutes

& trapdoors in the mind. Sisters & brothers,

the same thing’s going down all over town, town

after town. There is a prayer that goes Lord,

we are responsible. Harrow us through the waves,

the runnels & lace that pound, comb, reduce us so

we may be vessels for these stories.

Oh, the dazzling men torn one from the other,

these women taken, these motherless children.

Perhaps there’s no one to fashion such new grace,

the world hurtling its blind proposition

through space & prayer’s merely a style of waiting

beyond the Hour of Lead—

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—

First Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go. . .

But oh, let Emily become anything

but the harp she is, too human, to shiver

grievous such wracked & torn discord. Let her be

the foam driven before the wind over the lakes,

over the seas, the powdery glow floating

the street with evening—saffron, rose, sienna

bricks, matte gold, to be the good steam

clanking pipes, that warm music glazing the panes,

each fugitive moment the heaven we choose to make.

Copyright Credit: Lynda Hull, "Suite for Emily" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2006 by the Estate of Lynda Hull. Used by permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.Graywolf Press

Source: Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2006)