For R. C.
Arranged on the table, I close my eyes,
my hand curled around a cylinder
I'm told to squeeze every five seconds.
Stoic and intent, I've answered questions
about disease, travel, intimate relations:
have you had sex with strangers
in Gambia, Nepal--or with possible drug users,
within the last five years,
exchanged needles? I never revealed
my trips south of the border, the tango.
Nor confessed about the Turk
who seized my hand once and told me
he envied my long life ahead.
Nor admitted I've been reading Sylvia Plath
late at night, burnishing her poems
inside my head. Ghastly muse,
she's an eternal thirty
I can no more erase than she could kill
her awful daddy, already dead.
When I'm transfixed by thin blue lines
on yellow paper, when I'm weary, daunted,
she appears: a woman with a luminous smile
and a crisp voice who declares,
"the blood blooms clean in you, ruby."