Their poems forged my identity. They did not foretell, but they fore-informed my future. And, incidentally, they ruined my life. I couldn’t imagine any of us old.

2.

Sylvia

She parsed herself into something shingled, something cubistic. Something with edges. Look at how much weight she has lost in the past three months, as she has stayed so much to herself, nurturing her two babies and making rubrical blue lace in her maroon-backed notebook. She is tall with a tapered waist and scythe-like elbows. Her features have become angular and exaggerated like those of a Nubian sculpture. Her hunger has worked its way to the bone as well as onto the page. It was not so long ago that she carried some of the birthing surplus of her second child in her hips and thighs, and she bleached her hair, looking to rarefy her attitude. For the moment, she reminded friends of a good-natured Viking Amazon or a Klondike tavern wench. “The stork brought more than the baby,” they would say.

“And what’s she got to drop her jaw about?” the game-legged war widow now invariably sniggers to the next customer in line once Sylvia has pushed her double pram up the bluff of the exit ramp and through the glass door with the hypnotic spider’s signature in the center. “You could just about pound millet with its p’int.” Sylvia’s mare’s tail curls up, frizzled, the blond now bled out, at the small of her back. It lies there in the shape of a stalk of straw. She lets this maisonette here on the Primrose Hill side of Fitzroy Road wherein W. B. Yeats himself once germinated, and the rooms are reasonably expansive by London standards. But the front part of the convenience is a bottleneck and, dressing in the early dawn with her children still asleep, she stands with her back to the white wall in order to have a look at herself in the full-length mirror while the mad dog ghost, tethered in her commode, gurgles on for thirty or so seconds, chewing at the pipes. Her poet’s eye will not spare her feelings. Her image in the mirror looks even to her as though she were something carved in relief.

She takes her Seconal after breakfast to compensate for the sleep that she did not get the night before. Her long day is a languid, frigid aquacade, despite the three-ring of her two infants. Her bad self, also named Sylvia, floats by her, whistling. She wears a body armor of woven gauze. She casts a fearful shadow. She reminds Sylvia of Ted’s rabbit traps out on the lawn at Court Green. She can almost hear the dead meat singing. Court Green is the manor in North Tawton, Devon, that Ted claims he can afford, owing to his new half-standard position at the BBC. The manor is beloved by them both, but it is Sylvia alone who fears the wages of love. Ted is such a heedless, romantic spendthrift. It used to be the rejection slips that clotted their mailbox; now it’s the requests for payment.