Last Letter / Ted Hughes What happened that night? Your final night Double, treble exposure over everything Late afternoon, Friday My last sight of you alive Burning your letter to me in the ashtray With that strange smile
Had I bungled your plan? Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed? Had I rushed it back to you too promptly? One hour later you would have been gone Where I could not have traced you I would have turned from your locked, red door that nobody would open Still holding your letter A thunderbolt that could not earth itself That would have been electric shock treatment for me Repeated over and over all weekend As often as I read it or thought of it That would have remade my brains and my life The treatment that you planned needed some time I cannot imagine how I would have got through that weekend I cannot imagine
Had you plotted it all? Your note reached me too soon That same day, Friday afternoon Posted in the morning The prevalent devils expedited it That was one more straw of ill luck Drawn against you by the post office And added to your load
I moved fast Through the snow, blue, February London twilight Wept with relief when you opened the door A huddle of riddles in solution Precocious tears that failed to interpret to me Failed to divulge their real import
But what did you say Over the smoking shards of that letter So carefully annihilated So calmly That let me release you And leave you to blow its ashes off your plan Off the ashtray against which you would lean for me To read the doctor’s phone number
My escape had become such a hunted thing Sleepless, hopeless All its dreams exhausted Only wanting to be recaptured Only wanting to drop out of its vacuum
Two days of dangling nothing Two days gratias Two days in no calendar But stolen from no world Beyond actuality, feeling, or name
My love life grabbed it My numbed love life with its two mad needles Embroidering their rose Piercing and tugging at their tapestry Their bloody tattoo somewhere behind my navel Treading that morass of emblazon Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches Selecting among my nerves for their colors Refashioning me, inside my own skin Each refashioning the other With their self-caricatures Their obsessed in and out Two women, each with her needle
That night, my della Robbia Susan I moved with a circumspection of a flame and a fuse My whole fury was an abandoned effort to blow up The old globe where shadows Bent over my telltale track of ashes I raced from and from Faced backwards, a film reversed Towards what?
We went to Rugby Street Where you and I began Why did we go there? Of all places, why did we go there? Perversity in the artistry of our fate Adjusted its refinements for you, for me, and for Susan Solitaire, played by the minotaur of that maze Even included Helen in the ground-floor flat You’d noted her A girl for a story You never met her Few ever met her Except across the ears in raving mask of her Alsatian You hadn’t even glimpsed her You’d only recoiled when her demented animal Crashed its weight against the door As we slipped through the hallway And heard it choking on infinite German hatred
That Sunday night She eased her door open Its few permitted inches Susan greeted the black eyes The unhappy, overweight, lovely face that peeped out Across the little chain The door closed We heard her consoling her jailer inside her cell Its kennel where days later She gassed her ferocious cupo and herself
Susan and I spent that night in our wedding bed I’d not seen it since we lay there on our wedding day I didn’t take her back to my own bed It had occurred to me your weekend over You might appear A surprise visitation Did you appear to tap at my dark window?
So, I stayed with Susan Hiding from you In our own wedding bed The same from which within three years She would be taken to die in that same hospital Where, within 12 hours, I would find you dead
Monday morning I drove her to work in the city Then parked my van north of Houston Road And returned to where my telephone waited At what position of the hands on my watchface Did your last attempt Already deeply past my being able to hear it Shake the pillow of that empty bed A last time Lightly touch at my books and my papers By the time I got there, my phone was asleep The pillow innocent My room slept Already filled with the snowlit morning light I lit my fire I had got out my papers And I’d started to write when the telephone jerked awake In a jabbering alarm Remembering everything It recovered in my hand Then a voice like a selected weapon Or a measured injection Coolly delivered its four words deep into my ear “Your wife is dead”
Hughes tried. This is a powerful poem. As I said on FB, one can point to things Ted did wrong, he lived in more sexist and restricted times, but he is no more to blame ultimately for Sylvia’s death than Yoko was for the breakup of the Beatles. I read this a week or two ago, but lost track of it, thank you so much for posting the whole poem on your blog.
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Hughes tried. This is a powerful poem. As I said on FB, one can point to things Ted did wrong, he lived in more sexist and restricted times, but he is no more to blame ultimately for Sylvia’s death than Yoko was for the breakup of the Beatles. I read this a week or two ago, but lost track of it, thank you so much for posting the whole poem on your blog.