Letters from Max. Sarah Ruhl
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there is nowhere to put this
great happiness—
and you’re floating—and then you’re falling—
and then you have to lie down on the couch.
FRANCES: (simultaneously) JOAN:
Are you still in therapy Tilly? I know what you mean.
FEBRUARY 26
Sarah:
A proper note.
Melancholy Play in this song form is confusing and beautiful—the bricolage of musical intonations gives it a dizzy interpersonal body. It’s like how I imagine people engaged with opera when it was part of daily life. (I can’t follow operas the way I imagine they deserve to be followed, and this makes me feel like I get an opera-like experience—free from the overconventionalization of musicals but complicated in a register I can intuitively relate to.) Please send me more, and more poems. (Still love your poems best.)
The stomach holds up today, the flu seems to be in check. I don’t even want to talk about my physical health if I’m able to focus on anything else for two seconds in a row. I sense a wall from D. and I can’t blame her, I haven’t spoken to her in years, and all of a sudden I’m barging very suddenly and cancerily into her presence. We had a meal where she seemed to be obliging me. She called me “dude” at one point. Sarah, can you imagine anyone referring to me as “dude”? Urgh.
I am writing fairly good poems. More exciting has been the editing. Opacity is fear. I’m editing with that in mind. I’m noticing the poems are humbler than I thought they were, but that they have a sincere wit and imagination that is just fine on its own, even if I can’t live up to the crazily inflated diction of a Stevens. Opacity is fear. Embrace my voice and mind.
Love,
Max
MARCH 15
Dear Sarah,
A big chunk of our conversing today ended up in a very strange poem-thing. Wanted to share with you, since you are a prime mover in the poem.
I know this is still a first draft and I would love your input.
It was so much fun seeing you today—thank you for being you.
I will write more when it’s not the middle of the night after trying to write a poem all night.
Love,
Max
LISTENING, SPEAKING, AND BREATHING
I.
Pianos are told to repeat
the grieving tones of a bird.
How does the bird focus?
How does the piano focus, in turn?
II.
Wind is a force through air.
Air is the soft gilding powder of the chest.
The soft gilding powder that departs
into the shaking mural of the blood.
III.
Sense is not the same as essence.
Essence is entangled with the sliver of my voice.
Life might be very small victories and meanings.
Is saying “joy” a joyous thing, in and of itself?
IV.
Even if the tune seats the sense for an instant,
like a cloud through which blue is visible.
The red stripe of piping beef circling down
obnoxiously murmurs at death till it hushes.
V.
I have never listened, alone.
Always a guide, a fabric of love and need, absorbing in the ear.
Even the unlistening God
listens more than your own life.
VI.
Love comes from the mouth or in the heart
open on both ends, a craggy tunnel.
The impure love I make is all I know,
but its contents insist that there are others to make it.
VII.
To listen alone might find me
for once assured of a meaning in me.
Distraction, love, companion of narration,
you are not silence.
VIII.
In case of silence, could I cope?
The slender rod of my sense
white and pocked and feathered,
draws a triangle of fire in pure salt:
IX.
This shape is what is required to denote nothing more than me:
no unessential tissues, leaves, ponds, or songs.
I am boiling tar, transformed, or a thing in tar,
a thrill of heat or still a bone.
X.
If I am still an object,
then we’ll know that, won’t we?
I hope then, you’ll talk to me,
and I promise I’ll make sense of you.
MARCH 15
Dear Max,
It is gorgeous and sublime.
That is my input.
My other input is that the answer to the question posed in your poem is always yes—
the eternal yes that poets sing about,
the yes of the poet’s immortality.
xo,
Sarah
I have very little memory of that winter or spring. I was teaching graduate student playwrights that semester at Yale. I was also checking my children’s temperatures often, as they always seemed to have a cold. I was writing microessays because I felt incapable of writing a play while I was constantly checking my children’s temperatures. When the pediatrician saw me, she started to laugh, because I seemed to arrive at her doorstep every other day with one of my three children. I don’t know if my friendship with Max felt like an extension of my mothering, or a release from it, or both.
That March, I received a group missive from Max to his circle of friends updating us on his current condition:
Bleak news, though no immediate death sentence impending. My tumors remain unchanged, despite the new chemo. My lungs have been too irradiated due to my first cancer for a second attempt. The dosage would be too low to guarantee a response, and too high to not risk killing my lung tissue. Surgery also doesn’t seem to be a likely option given the subcentimeter size of my tumors, their deep enjambment in my lungs, and the slipperiness of Ewing’s cells. Surgery is