12. Submerged in the waters of Lethe

Sleep, dream, opiates, oblivion. Years in which I read Keats above all others, culminating finally in a visit to his home on the edge of Hampstead Heath. A life surrounded by dark colors, drawn curtains, bottles of cabernet and candlelight. Solitary hours in a moonlit garden, midnight excursions to graveyards, daylong pilgrimages to the Symbolist gallery of the Art Institute in Chicago.

My companion through many of these years, in my twenties and thirties, was another poet, Virginia DeCourcey, a woman with sensibilities even darker than my own. On our first solitary walk together, to an old graveyard in the small hours of the night, we came to an open, newly-dug grave, and without a word she climbed down into it and lay silently at the bottom, disappearing into its shadow. Since childhood she had written fiction and formal philosophy and newspaper editorials, but when she met me she began writing poetry, almost with a vengeance. It was like nothing I had ever read.

GRAVETIME

I.

The death wings of a bird
reflect a star,
voyaging to the other side of the world

I resent the journey,
the lessening of light,
feeling it in my heart
as if it were the night

the unhopeful winter
surges toward spring
on feathered gallows:
sea steps change ~~
and beyond the strand,
I saw the small body of spring
slain on the hilltop,
the bride of many whirling ravens.

II.

Gravediggers stand near,
gaunt as oaks in winter ~~

I feel my fingers starved
as newly buried bone,
clutching black silk:
within the coffin lies a woman,
her gold-willed hair
crushed beneath a skullcap ~~
a many-jewelled and horned headdress
the gravedigger gave her:
he gave me nothing,
as befitting those who
sleep before gravetime ~~
where winter is the eternal
and unlovely season.

III.

There must have been a reason,
a beginning to winter ~~
the void of birds
makes it difficult to remember:

as if the fragile veins and wings
of what must have been my being ~~
snapt shut suddenly
as the shell of a sea-thing,
or the cold metal lock
of a secretive box ~~
(to deny the light
and touch the frost).

IV.

My mother was a seamstress,
she sewed me shut:
my mother was a seamstress,
her needle pierced my heart:

we never spoke,
as one would speak,
beyond the curtained window ~~
yet waking in the night,
I heard her sigh in the other room,
and thought her breasts
were wakeful, as in another world
she was a bowl of lilies
in a sphere of hyacinth and yew ~~
she was a bowl of lilies,
my father plucked her roots,

letting the frost in.

V.

Like unwilling birds of prey
that light on the horned ledges
in a grotto of the heart,
the sea rushes in:
purifying the carrion
of stone cages within ~~

in winter awakening,
my body feels unsure ~~
smelling of death somehow
in its meagre warmth:
the world intones
a fraility I cannot grasp ~~
I start, and try to hear
the words pronounced:

there would be an ending to this ~~
as waiting, a train filled
with birds finally comes:
the rustle of their winged discontent
fills the terminal like women
crying in a prism of sand and ice.

VI.

Carved walls of intricate thought,
trees of solace grow berries
fastidious as shrunken autumn’s aftermath:

seeds black and round ~~
hurtful spheres containing
the mirror of another light:
worlds stand side by side,
doors passing from each,
domes of torn being ~~

as if I lived in the heat
of a distant star,
and knew it ~~
pressing it into my body:

yet here, within my breasts,
the frost remains ~~
dark birds light upon my heart,
and I have waited for the rest,
have known it ~~
as an unlovely visitor,
the forbidden guest ~~
that stole the sweetest fruit,
burying it ~~ hard and bitter
in ripeness it decays:

(they whispered she was digging
her own grave), filling it
with black seeds:

thoughts like hawks
that glean the countryside:
or on a solitary branch,
I wait in cormorant attitude ~~

VII.

While beyond,
the sea is chanting,
its hollows and caves
an echoing cathedral ~~
a massive organ voice
with silver pipes:
it imitates the motion of the earth,
and never dies ~~

I hunt close to the shore,
not wandering out over
the great black rocks:

I do not know how
I will find death
in so immense a thing:
my heart has long been carrion
to the birds within ~~
I sound a bell in the dark,
hoping it will find me out.

She died young, as she always said she would, at the age of thirty-six, over twenty years ago. I have never been able to write directly of her death, but I do write of it, as in the following poem about Elizabeth Siddall or, more specifically, about one of Rossetti’s portraits of her in the Art Institute, which Virginia and I first saw together on an autumn day over thirty years ago — when I vowed secretly to devote my life to poetry :

 

AN ELIXIR OF POPPIES

I.

A cloud of remnant flames that sway
on slender stalks above a mound
of green entangled frond on frond
whose petals droop and drop away

to lie in tatters on the grass ~
while still the heavy-headed blooms
imbue the air with drowsy fumes
that linger long before they pass.

The poppies rise, unfurl and swell
and spread their petals to the sun
till every hue is all undone
and every husk a hollow shell.

II.

Rossetti to his Lizzie gave
elixir of the poppy’s bloom,
displacing all her pain with gloom
and bedding her within a grave,

but ere the lid was hammered tight
he lay his sonnets at her cheek
as though her muted lips might speak
his lyrics to the airless night.

At length a season passed away ~
the grass upon her grave stood tall ~
Rossetti could not sleep at all
for dreaming of her where she lay.

He quelled his sorrow and regret
with little sips of laudenum ~
elixir of the poppy’s bloom
that wrapt and held him in its net

and drew him into visions such
as only thralls to beauty see,
that verge upon insanity
and touch what only spirits touch ~

then dead at last to all but art,
as though possessed, he drew and drew,
his every line a root that grew
around and through her buried heart.

III.

The light that pierced her deathly sleep
and fell upon her dreamless eyes
was not of angels come to prise
her body from the musty deep

but only of Rossetti’s friends
who sought to wrest the sonnets from
the fastness of oblivion
and so undo a noble end.

On Highgate’s old and holy ground
they knelt beside her open grave,
disciples of the holy cave
who could not speak of what they found

except the hair of poppy red
that down upon her shoulders spilled
in such luxuriance it filled
the confines of her coffin-bed.

IV.

Within a dim and airless hall
within an airless gallery,
her portrait hangs for all to see,
it casts a melancholy pall ~

of sad serenity composed,
her face conveys a deathly calm,
a poppy lies upon her palm,
her upward-gazing eyes are closed.

 

Virginia died under mysterious circumstances, the victim of a brutal homicide.  The police investigation turned up nothing.  The private investigator I hired also failed to uncover anything.  Afterwards, for several months, there were a number a paranormal incidents.

In her twenty-ninth year, over a period of not more than several weeks, she wrote a cluster of highly original poems and put them together as a book.  After this burst of inspiration she continued to write, but none of her subsequent poems possessed the visionary intensity of those written during the several week period.  She also found that, while she believed her poems stood in need of revision, she was unable to work on them.  This in itself was strange, as she had been a professional journalist, editor and academic writer for years. 

Her collection, Vernal Equinox, now available for the first time, can be downloaded as a pdf file. 

 

 

RAINY HYADES

The rainy Hyades rise in the autumn evening
and bring the yearning of that season,
as a starry scythe that harvests the horizon ~~
hyacinths deepen to a withered purple,
scattering like birds before the chill blade ~~
so my heart in autumn worships the lips
and breasts of spring: on a long dark couch, her russet
hair outspread.
                                  The mask of the moon
that betrays the outworn beauty of the body,
rises before a darkened mirror: golden claw
of your nakedness displaying lapis lazuli, to ornament
warm blood, pulse of beauty, cannot be traced
in a wreath of thorns
prickly as stubble in a yellow field ~~
it bruises the skin of morning, to hint
that all is mortal.

When I found spring in a thicket, in a world grown old,
she wore a golden embroidered cap
like Persephone’s, close-fitting as skin,
to hide the secret hair of her autumn:
such was Hyades rising in the enigma of rain,
as the halo wound about the sun
on yearning days ~~
     its passion remembered:
a golden claw that accompanies
the face of the sphinx.
                                             I loved the body,
its rainy coolness against black deeps
like a violet wild on a far tundra ~~
to nourish beyond the short span of the moon,
creating unnatural lines of grace
among thawing streams where black carp drift
before the divining tree.
                                            How is it
to awaken within the moment of body
firm like warming snow,
to melt distorted, features frozen,
preserving the unstable state of the heart?

When the moon grows thin and pock-marked,
it rides above the venery of a world
gone russet with death ~~ like a woman’s body
no longer young ~~ stretched and brown
in the settled fullness of red berries gathered
beneath a scythe of bitter stars:

It is rainy Hyades that enters my heart
on certain guessing days
that come round again like familiar planets
seen through a cloudy lens ~~
with the world grown dusk, I feel
unaccountable tears
and pray for the passion of the body:

as if I were already among the ushepti
in that vast pyramid in Hades’ depth,
handmaid to a dark and golden lord,
jewel-beaked and embracing wing:
his underworld.

                               Be it not yet,
my heart is too filled with the wonder of blue
egyptian swallows, though winter marks
the granite of their resting place.

I would see again
the vaulted radiance of early day,
to wish
     like a dark coach rushing through rainy hills
to the pines of Mantua:

I did when young,
when all the world was pure lilies for the taking.

How it is to grow old ~~
a dying out, a confusion of the stars,
is the beginning here, to feel autumn in the heart,
and beauty no easy thing to claim ~~

to search for grace like the withered loins
of an old man, to be defeated
by a sudden tremor of heart’s unease:
rainy Hydes, you come in autumn
and in your starlight
I see the scattered hyacinths lying
within a vault of supernal night.

I could only ever write of Virginia figuratively.   The truth of her was not something to be arrived at by any other means.  She was “Lizzie, Our Lady of Laudenum”  or  “Catherine, Wraith of the Moors”.

 

HEATHCLIFF

Our childhood vow a holy trust–
betrayed but once & all was lost
& we forevermore accursed.

Never could we be apart,
we invoked the lover’s art,
devouring each the other’s heart.

No lord of earth or beast of hell
could chasten what we were or quell
the storm that held our soul or tell

the thing that drew us both as one,
darkening our sun & moon –
utterly we were alone –

yet after all the ruinous cost,
for all I strove to hold her fast,
like any mortal she was lost.

Insensibly I paced the moor,
howled my craven heart, a cur
shriven by a cruel allure

until, in a dim, dismal place,
I plunge a muddy spade, expose
a coffin, a shrouded face.

Years have passed — still I wait,
empty glass, empty plate,
embers crumble through the grate.

The wind tonight unties the trees,
makes the shepherd draw the fleece
about his ears — a strange unease

possesses me, I faintly hear
a broken wail upon the moor
forsaken as the damned — I swear,

a moment at the window as
I raise my eyes I see her pass,
shadowy beyond the glass,

but I have kept too long alone –
I know no longer what is known,
cannot tell a shade from stone,

cannot tell the day from night –
I keep the doorway bolted tight –
I live my life by candlelight.

Endlessly from west & north
cold & darkness issue forth,
beneath the door, across the hearth.

The wind sustains a piercing note,
I wrap myself within a coat,
I pull the collar to my throat.

Over, over again,
drum upon the windowpane
frenzied fists, driving rain.