Collateral Damage: Poetry Biographies by Mickey J. Corrigan
The Poet's First Wife (Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot on T.S. Eliot) And when living is done he told me one fiery night he would like his bones flung into my grave. Happiness is not for me married to a genius happiness is for women without a man with a destiny. His thick man's hands around the lumpen knot in my slivered throat. He did not live with me in this world in our cold flat in his mind always the long view at the bank where he worked at the pub where he hid searching for words to drive his engine into the future with a throttle to the core of it all the twisted parts buried in his past. I withered like a grape sucked to a raisin sun plucked, dried out and barren, barren. (more) He said he still wanted my needles and thrusts the pain that kept him from a mediocre life that kept him brutally alive. He was mine, he was me and I saw me when I met my own eyes in his disapproving face. He rose from our mattress white fingers like ice his need for renewal like a tremble pulse that shakes the heart while I kept a nest of buzzing hornets under our empty bed and was sane to the point of insanity. I was like a bag of ferrets around my lovers' necks Virginia Woolf said I should let go let Tom sing hymns write doggerel while I bathed my heart in a cool, cool stream. She took the stones to the bottom muck while I got manhandled by the masters of lunacy alone in a cage of self-immolation. This is my lament for a fallen world: I waited for him at the still point of his sad, sad heart.
The Poet's Poet Wife (Sylvia Plath on Ted Hughes) He thought marriage a nest of scorpions, the bloody monster that ate up many little snakes but I was his luck, he said our marriage his spiritual medium from which richness spilled forth in bed or out we struck sparks in our lyrical folie à deux. Searching for the naked inner voice we left the urban crush and chaos for the countryside of his youth among creatures of wilderness lush heather, still ponds water-voles, the tawny owl that lit upon his dark head but my new position as university teacher led to his and we entered the rat race in America, the beer he said unspeakable, unspewable like sucking old pennies jobs that petrified his glands crippling him with emotional dryness in the buffed and glazed unnatural world of Cadillacs, fake smiles, brash opulence brilliant hues in see-through crusts bright plastic, plastic everywhere. Across the open sea again to the constant cold rumble the huge forge of London pounding us down, down my husband a public figure in a windowless cell of fame we struggled in self-anesthesia the baby an exhaustive delight. Our poetry followed close on blood-sticky feet, we felt trapped tight together needing space to write (more) apart we escaped to the moorland by the river he dreamed of a rural country home a small hut where he could work a greenhouse, orchard, garden: potatoes and beans, fresh peas rhubarb stalks and leaves so tall they were taking over the house! And the birds: pheasants stalking in bright plumes, kingfishers thrushes, redwings, swifts flocking on our squishy fruit our seventy-one apple trees pears, peaches—and beehives our abundance blessed again a second child, a son. Elemental, part of the landscape he grew broody, slinking past the dream otters to the River Taw to fish his new good luck charm —not me, not anymore I was the dead end of everything with my duties, distractions babies, nappies, every meal a gourmet production, meanwhile I paled, withered in comparison to the bohemian free life with her, his archetypal witch. What happens in the heart simply happens, he said. Mine fractured into shards. My poetry carried me forth on a bareback ride of eloquent rage to the city, to Yeats' old home where I wrote in a red fury the best poems of my life snowed in with two babies knocked on tranquilizers flu and frozen pipes (more) singular pain rippling through familiar from days in the hole they pulled me out and shrunk me down, down to fit the mold. He drove through a blizzard to bring me cold potatoes from our country garden and I knew he still cared I was the hedgehog he loved prickles that kept him attached my Hanged Man was moon tossed by my depressionist art by my undertow to darkness my death-ray stares my loaded crossbow my impossible interference in his explosive stardom and lusts. Snowdrifts up to the windows and me in my thin nightgown kneeling before the oven door deep in domestic depression drugged out on doctor's orders the madwoman wife, mad life no doubt where the blame lies the only person who could help me transformed me into the mat he wiped his black boots on on his way out the door.
About the Poet:
Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a twist of humor. Novels have been published in the US, UK, and elsewhere. Poetry has appeared in many literary journals and as chapbooks. Home lies somewhere in the wilds of Florida.
