Bad behavior. Drunken brawls. Baudy trysts. He didn’t want to go to America, supposedly, but to America he came because American institutions paid him good money to read his poems. It was in America, on one of these poetry tours, he went into a coma and died, “brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,” as immortalized in Amy Clampitt’s poem “The Kingfisher.” He claimed he’d drunk eighteen whiskeys that night. Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy? He was the news; the show was suddenly over. Poets flocked his hospital room. Friend by enemy I call you out. There was a poet I met when I was young who couldn’t accept that I didn’t want to sleep with him. This troubadour wrote me letters from Berlin, on and on. He wrote me a poem: “your dress falls from your limbs / your palms filled with your breasts / you offer me dropped apples.” Stop! Not from Berlin, not from anywhere! I still have his letters. I was angry when I reread them years later and found I’d been grossly objectified, but I’m not angry now. I let myself be entertained by him, by his ridiculous overblown imagination, his sincere, embarrassing longing. I was a little bored, I suppose. I must have half-liked the attention, receiving typewritten love letters full of German umlauts. I should have written, “Dear Poet, you’re not Dylan Thomas, and I’m not what you think I am—look elsewhere.” But I didn’t protest, not at all, so he just kept sending letters, as well as two postcards, and a typewriter ribbon I never used.
-Morgan English