the tulips are too excitable it is winter here look how white everything is how quiet how snowed in i am learning peacefulness lying by myself quietly as the light lies on these white walls this bed these hands i am nobody i have nothing to do with explosions i have given my name and my day clothes up to the nurses and my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons they have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet cuff like an eye between two white lids that will not shut stupid pupil it has to take everything in the nurses pass and pass they are no trouble they pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps doing things with their hands one just the same as another so it is impossible to tell how many there are my body is a pebble to them they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over smoothing them gently they bring me numbness in their bright needles they bring me sleep now i have lost myself i am sick of baggage my patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox my husband and child smiling out of the family photo their smiles catch onto my skin little smiling hooks i have let things slip a thirty year old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address they have swabbed me clear of my loving associations scared and bare on the green plastic pillowed trolley i watched my teaset my bureaus of linen my books sink out of sight and the water went over my head i am a nun now i have never been so pure i didnt want any flowers i only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty how free it is you have no idea how free the peacefulness is so big it dazes you and it asks nothing a name tag a few trinkets it is what the dead close on finally i imagine them shutting their mouths on it like a communion tablet the tulips are too red in the first place they hurt me even through the gift paper i could hear them breathe lightly through their white swaddlings like an awful baby their redness talks to my wound it corresponds they are subtle they seem to float though they weigh me down upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color a dozen red lead sinkers round my neck nobody watched me before now i am watched the tulips turn to me and the window behind me where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins and i see myself flat ridiculous a cut paper shadow between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips and i have no face i have wanted to efface myself the vivid tulips eat my oxygen before they came the air was calm enough coming and going breath by breath without any fuss then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river snags and eddies round a sunken rust red engine they concentrate my attention that was happy playing and resting without committing itself the walls also seem to be warming themselves the tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals they are opening like the mouth of some great african cat and i am aware of my heart it opens and closes its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me the water i taste is warm and salt like the sea and comes from a country far away as health 9
['poetry']