And killed it in an hour.
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
By whatever these pink things mean!
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
And comes from a country far away as health.