Philip Burton
Telegram
DR. ELSA HAHN. AGE 35. ARRIVING HOVE 14.7.63. STOP.
Well, she came she sawed she chuntered on
with eminent authority:
a smiling doting blond 'Shakespeare Companion'.
Or outside you could hear Brighton Beach
as the clenching pebble faces clattered
in a fusion of keys. Intimate. Out of reach.
She summed up King Lear: a paradigm
of Unaccommodated Man? Pity
a corroded life, yes. But the lesson
was lost on me. Doctor, if you do not write, you leech.
How do you know what mattered
in the over-reaching of a king. And creature
comfort? Have you survived when hope had gone?
Hardly! I went with no temerity
after-hours, "Dear Doc., where is your qualification
for understanding pain?" Her blue eyes beseeched.
She rolled a sleeve. Slatefresh,
a black inlay on her peach
skin; 4 2 6 9 1 5 3 1... Belsen.
Now I walk on the strand line, the place of some parity,
when the shy wet-nurse tide has long long gone;
I have scratched my face with salt, hung weed
in my hair, practising sanity;
"Know my son that nothing in this life is guaranteed."
Her nurturing mind, her outward reach
from the greatest Hell, her very blood, shattered.
She smiled. Opened up. "You too can teach."
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