It starts, then, with love: the mornings with her infant daughter in the cramped bedroom off Chalcot Square, Ted writing at first on the ridiculous rickety card table the Merwins had loaned, set up in the vestibule. It was his own little womb, she teased him. Too narrow for anyone to get by with Ted crouching enormously in his chair before his papers, facing the walls he had painted a deep vermilion. But that first London apartment was her birthplace also: she labored Frieda in their giant six-foot-square bed, an event—not the birth itself, but the existential act of giving birth to her child, a complete and separate being—she could see, then as now, as nothing but the beginning of her real existence. Becoming a mother: it was the galvanizing moment of her life. She would never do anything else to touch it, this ineffable transforming act. It drew her like a flame; it was a sound she couldn’t help turning toward, literally also.

The poem itself she wrote much later, almost a year after, during that strange February of mounting anxiety: the second baby lost so swiftly, Ted’s accumulating success and she secretary to his mail and calls, still not writing herself with predictable ease. The dismal prospect of an appendectomy and a week in hospital. In blue jeans and a rumpled shirt left over from Smith, the poet’s wan wife, pushing a pram sans makeup. She thought, then, she was losing everything—her unblemished marriage, Ted, the words she could not seem to uncover—and she clung with a desperation she believed she had long ago exorcised. Not the desperation of a supplicant, but of a Fury. It was a month of red and white, a valentine mocking her, something she was part of and not part of, like her poem: the bloody clots, the walls in that claustrophobic apartment, the Irish hair, and the seductive voice on the phone, the lipstick—not hers—she was so sure of, and where was he? The red leather cover of Ted’s Oxford Shakespeare. How dare he? She ripped it up: the tattered pages floated down, like snowflakes—but it wasn’t snow. She’d been waiting every year for snow in England; she waited still. She wanted snow’s erasure, its lustration.