I’ve been following the terrible news about young Sarah Fox at a distance and with tightly-woven sorrow. It sits very close to home, and so I haven’t wanted to look it in the facts.
Tragedy defies ranking; there isn’t any meaningful way to say that this or that calamity is more or less powerful or grievous than any other. Much about Sarah’s death has captured the public’s heart, and rightly so. Much about her death also brings me back a jolting 20 years to the winter of 1984, when my friend Caroline Isenberg was murdered on the Upper West Side.
Like Sarah Fox, Caroline was an actress of gleeful power and effortless depth. We worked together only once, at college in a house production of The Ascent of Mount Fuji by Chingiz Aitmatov and the less-Googleable Kaltai Mukhamedzhanov. Her character had one set of tragedies to deal with and mine had another – among other things, I had a kissing scene with a quiet pretty girl who resolutely would not be kissed, play or no play – and we spent time giggling and dreaming together about a future as fine as that warm season, lushly decorated with late spring days and growing grass, and nights that sang when you strummed them.
Caroline graduated from Harvard with the class of 1984. I was living in Italy at that point. She moved to New York and was cast in a downtown play. She was stabbed to death on December 2, 1984, coming home from rehearsal. It was an attempted robbery that turned into an attempted rape, in the lobby and then the elevator of her building; she fought against him and he dragged her to the roof and killed her there. Caroline was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, small and compactly built, with a gale of red hair and bright eyes that brimmed with clarity and keen, easy charm. She lived for a number of hours on the operating table, but didn’t leave it. She was 23 years old.
I wrote this poem for her in Italy, and it was published in the Fall ‘85 volume of Padan Aram at Harvard. If you are curious and have proper time and surroundings, I recommend that you read it aloud, which is how I write; it needn’t be declaimed, but the words have a taste to them. I am a great mutterer when I write poetry, and this piece in particular has a life in the mouth.
Love Song for Caroline (1961 – 1984)
These afternoons pass
through a lattice of ivy and sun
wild welts striping tame roses
a listless wind
stripping shrivelled petals
stroking among the thorns
not green now but horned, hard
dressed and armored for
the coming, coming winter.
For years now
I have not been to New York
but I follow the old
East Coast motions
as a matter of iron habit.
Imagine a series of clicks
a flow along a wire
the tumbling of those
indispensable numbers
the mechanical equivalent
of crushing grapes into wine.
This is how
I heard of your death,
from a sorry voice across
an ocean and a sea
and she said, the voice cracking,
that there was blood on the rooftop
that the police came quickly
but still it was too late.
Caroline,
when we die there is always this voice
you can never see her eyes
the police are always too late.
It is December, a month cold
with the cruel passing of flaming autumn.
Now the shadows are pale
and the roses seem wild,
the flowers long since fallen
long since blown away
the graceful vines crusted
and tough. This year almost
the incandescent trees
burned as red as your hair
almost the freckling of leaves
over white marble slabs
stacked like seasons in their yards,
was like your arms.
This season was too wet
grapes rotted on the vines
before they dropped clotted and sticky
under the harvest blades.
Still the transubstantiation
is already taking place
and wine is brewing in buckets
in tall wooden vats and demijohns.
Over this paper I am crying
I have been crying all day
but there is no wine
but bitter wine
to make from these tears.
Linus Gelber – winter 1984/85
Pietrasanta
Sometimes things happen and you think how much life sucks.
Beautiful poem.
So sorry for your loss. It’s tragic, and the pain of your poem makes that palpable, even to the casual reader…
Thank you both for reading. Starhawk, haven’t seen you here in a while, so welcome back. It’s amazing how much power there is in some events; all these years later, it still moves me.
I knew Caroline, too. I was good friends with her younger brother Marcus. We all spent time together at their home in Brookline and on campus at Harvard. Her death was a splash of cold water on my 19 year old fever, and no less so 20 years later.
caroline isenberg ,and marcus are my brother and sister.your poem was beautiful,thank you.our mother passed away in 1987 and our father who has remarried lives on beacon hill in boston.