Hayden Carruth: Letter to Denise

Remember when you put on that wig
From the grab bag and then looked at yourself
In the mirror and laughed, and we laughed together?
It was a transformation, glamorous flowing tresses.
Who knows if you might not have liked to wear
That wig permanently, but of course you
Wouldn’t. Remember when you told me how
You meditated, looking at a stone until
You knew the soul of the stone? Inwardly I
Scoffed, being the backwoods pragmatic Yankee
That I was, yet I knew what you meant. I
Called it love. No magic was needed. And we
Loved each other too, not in the way of
Romance but in the way of two poets loving
A stone, and the world that the stone signified.
Remember when we had that argument over
Pee and piss in your poem about the bear?
“Bears don’t pee, they piss,” I said. But you were
Adamant. “My bears pee.” And that was that.
Then you moved away, across the continent,
And sometimes for a year I didn’t see you.
We phoned and wrote, we kept in touch. And then
You moved again, much farther away, I don’t
Know where. No word from you now at all. But
I am faithful, my dear Denise. And I still
Love the stone, and, yes, I know its soul.

Hayden Carruth: Auburn Poem

A book I was reading this morning
by Milan Kundera contains this: "In the algebra
of love a child is the symbol of the magical

sum of two beings." And now that child
is thirty-nine years old; she is suffering
from a cancer which we are told is incurable

and will become fatal. You have been married
for thirty years to another man, and I
have been married to three other women

and have lived with six whom I did not
marry—a disgrace but there it is, done
and irrevocable. We are old. You are

sixty-nine and I am seventy. It would be
sentimental folly to say I can see in you,
or you in me, the lineaments of our

loving youth. Yet it is true. Your voice
especially takes me back. We are here
because our daughter, whom we conceived

one fine April night in Chicago long ago,
is crucially vulnerable. We meet in agony,
in wordless despair. We meet after years

of separation and mildly affectionate
unconcern. But it's true, true, this child
who is a mature, afflicted woman

with children of her own, is still a symbol
of that magical sum we were, and in this
wretchedness, without word or touch or hidden

glance, I hold myself out to you, and I know
I am accepted without word or touch or hidden
glance. This, so late, the crisis of our lives.