Sylvia

sylvia was it really you those last weeks of your life? from the first wide-eyed disbelieving horror at the ice-killer in your womb but you were still strong then, strong sylvia, shouting, your blonde hair swinging, throwing pillows at the nurses when they tried to move you painfully to a chair and in the end you broke their ignorance and stayed regally in bed as they wheeled you to the lift, laughing behind your hand then, in the sad green-tree-shaded room of the hospice you melted, day by day, down to your skin. New creatures in you took shape and when I looked, you were a just-hatched chick tiny, white, and so beautiful the fair hair matted to the skull, the fragile claws occasionally waving as you wove a dream or memory your gaze of speechless innocence I shall never forget I had not thought there was such innocence left in you you who were always so wise in your wildness in the sweet sick room where patients coughed or retched or bleeped their bleepers you whispered the secrets of your transformations to our deaf ears yesterday you were a bird with open beak spreadeagled on the pillow then you became a leaf just pulsing in the daylight the hair-like veins murmuring in your white arm while death licked at your stalk, hour by hour, so that at last you could fly