Mrs Yeats’ Love Letters from the Other Side
Mrs Yeats slackens carefully in her comfortable front room.
Perhaps her slow arm drags a lace antimacassar from a sofa back.
Perhaps her lips part in an O. Mrs Yeats unfolds and sags.
Where is Mr Yeats? We would all like to know this.
Here are his papers, haphazard on the bureau. Mrs Yeats
will not attempt to tidy them again! Here are his spectacles,
exactly where he put them down.
Hurry, hurry! Something surely speaks through Mrs Yeats!
Her shoulders dance, now. Her soft heels buzz, now, on the carpet
but he does not come. Oh, let the answers bide a while!
Mrs Yeats’ right hand is a wonder. It is a conduit; she is famed for it.
Watch now as it clutches at the pen. Sometimes she will visualise
her arteries and veins as pipes. Sometimes she can see a message
pucker at her wrists before the spirits take her up and write.
She starts to write.
Mr Yeats? She calls tightly from the floor, her elbows
skidding on paper. Oh, Mr Yeats, I have another happening…
And what a feeling, when it comes! It is a honeymoon
of something rushing up and spilling out of her at once.
When it comes, she thinks herself blessed, or else a wild girl
with a stick between her teeth, bucking at the crackle in her head.
Oh, quickly, Mr Yeats! Your gentle, lovely wife begins to write!
Rush your glasses to your face and let it please you –
this urgent letter from the Other Side.
And if it please you, place a dry hand on her hair
and leave it for an instant. She will love this unexpected present –
she will love the ghostly weight of you on her.
Mrs Yeats would ask for nothing more.
Rachel Curzon‘s debut pamphlet was published in 2016 under the Faber New Poets scheme. She has had other work published in The Rialto, Magma, Tangerine and the Bridport Anthology. Rachel lives in North Yorkshire.