“The Rabbit Catcher.” “A Birthday Present.” He turns the pages, slipping them to the floor as he finishes, each sheet skidding farther out than the last. Around him the unheard cries and crunch of bone, the convulsive snap of electrodes, the sickly stench of burning hair. “Words heard, by accident, over the phone.” “Stings.” Around him the intolerable ringing, ringing, ringing of the telephone; the rustle of linen, the tears, the soiled bed of their marriage. He reads, taking her in. Not merely her words, her blistering vision of how he has failed her, but the thunderclap of her artistic bravado. Her unflinching authority—that of a surgeon taking up a scalpel against her own disease.

She sees him across the room, the muscles pulsing under his skin. He holds a page in his hand, leaning forward, elbows steadied on his knees, reading. She watches him from the threshold, from the distance of imaginative assembly: not merely spurned wife but poet, the crafter of their temporal life into language, performer of the act that was her preservation, if not theirs. The worst blows to their marriage were no more real, no more solid, than her poems; she used them, tempered them, their objectifying alchemy—for her—cooled and hardened.

But not for Ted. Ted is quiet, he does not speak. He turns the pages, astonished and brutalized; he reads. “Fever 103.” “Burning the Letters.” The pages fall. Her words hurtle on, meteoric, the fiery husk of planets transforming cold to heat; death to naked, throbbing, furious life. His hands are full of her, page after page: the agony and the rage, the flames licking, the layers peeling back, the fresh new thing emerging in its glistening skin, awesome and terrible to behold.

Sylvia watches. She watches Ted’s forefinger slide down the back of a page, a finger down her spine. Lifting, turning, the page floating to the floor. Like a snowflake, a free and inimitable thing, riding the air. Ted, too, watches its flight. Humility, distress complicate his face, clouding his brow and the cast of his eyes, a response of involved confusion—respect, horror, tortured admiration for the undeniable marvel of what she’s accomplished, a genius he can’t possibly deny. And as he reads, on and on, she sees it. She reads it in his eyes: she has pierced him. She’s gotten to him, the one she wanted most, through to some vital place, Homer’s soldier, mortally wounded, his head bowing like a poppy under the weight of his helmet, heavy as a poppy on its stem.