Letters from friends about manuscript of “Another Elegy” and The Museum of Clear Ideas take me back inside my poems and away from my damned liver—but memory of that dark hourglass barbell shape reruns itself on the witless screen. I try to snow it over: Go away, go away, go away. Usually I feel calm enough, and when I notice that I am calm I am surprised. But sometimes my hands suddenly go cold. Jane and I hug—standing, sitting, and lying down; sometimes we weep, overcome by the sadness of our eventual absence from each other. Then we dry our eyes and get back to work. Or I talk to my daughter Philippa who is waiting to go into labor, a happy distraction; who seems optimistic and almost convinces me. Or I talk to my son, just thirty-eight and waiting for a new child in a month, who was dark and dour at first but who is now combative; who will, if I require a further more experimental operation, canvas the country for the best treatment, avid and powerful on the telephone. Or I talk to my mother, who last week tortured herself reading in a fifty year old encyclopedia that the liver was untouchable and that metastasis meant prompt death. Or I watch the Boston Celtics (playoffs with Indiana) or the Boston Red Sox, lifting a microphone to dictate to an editor, “This piece is a bit early because …” or to a program director, “I won’t be able to come …” or to a friend far away, “I’ve got bad news …”
Work. Work. Work.
As I recover from this operation, I will be frustrated getting back to work. Letters and manuscripts will accumulate; poems and prose will lie inert, as I lack energy to think or summon language. And I will need to watch out for silliness, inadvertent error, dumb ideas, or even delusion. Is it the anaesthesia? the mania of survival? Last time it was months before my mind felt normal. How do you watch out for a deluded mind when your only equipment is a deluded mind?
But I continue to obsess, instead of (as I wish) obsessing to continue.
April 27, late morning, the telephone rings and it is my son-in-law Jerry: another granddaughter! Abigail and her mother Philippa are fine, and we can see the baby at 2:00 P.M. There is nothing so easily happy as a healthy birth; happy excitement floods Jane and me. Four granddaughters! When we see her at Concord Hospital, Philippa is cheerful, if a bit bruised-looking, and teases me as Jane and I take turns holding the tiny baby not yet accustomed to air and light. I had questioned the spelling of their first daughter Allison’s name, so Philippa assures me that Abigail is spelled with two b’s. She laughs until she hurts. We drive home, after setting up a schedule to see Abigail and Philippa over the next two days, bringing an absorbed excitement with us. It is essential that my mind stay in the present: Let there be no daydreams of dancing at Abigail’s wedding.