Shoehorn
more than you know. a cradle (to put it lightly) of pleasure for your
nearness. forgive me. i am an old wheel (& nothing less). close your
legs, please. keep the night between us kiss.ing. dirt-faced & bare in a
room not our own. generous thief stuck straight by measure. you
asked me to church & nobody will stop me. ninetythree steps the devil
crept & upon the whole he suddenly became me. it was there that i
fell in the red-edged glories of H— my doubt of doubts: is that your
voice? give over your fiend (the others long have) for whose proud
song is here&now / we know / O we know... but how do i tell you;
the night is an age when no one of me ever turned the edge of life like
a mind without a body (asleep i believe) & only smiled in vain.
Mollusk
i.
Haworth, November 1904.
It was rash to wait for fine weather,
cowardly; for in the daylight the striking
loneliness of the Yorkshire moors could not
impress on her how far surroundings
radically affect people’s minds.
A sentimental traveller
with so clear an image of Haworth
from print and picture. Her excitement
as she approached the town took
an element of suspense; as though
upon arrival she would meet some
long-separated friend, who might
have changed in the interval.
She felt justified in her pilgrimage
to the home of Charlotte Brontë
and her sisters. Undoubtedly
her curiosity is legitimate.
Look! What countryside!
It is the parish and parsonage
and the school where Charlotte taught
and the Bull Inn where Branwell drank
that collectively seem to add
something to her understanding of their books.
The tow, dingy and commonplace
and the vast, undulating moors framed
the Brontës as much as the Brontës expressed
the Northern gloom, knuckled together
like a snail’s soft body to its shell.
And it is here, in the museum
as Charlotte is examined under glass
through an assemblage of autographs
and epistles, scraps and sketches
that the dead woman comes to life
by way of a wedding dress
and a pair of little cloth boots.
These personal relics, which so confound
the natural fate of such things to die
before the body that wore them,
cause us to forget the chiefly
memorable fact that she was a great writer.
“Her shoes and her thin muslin dress have outlived her!” she said
and grimly hedged by a cemetery of keepsakes
the homestead waned as a treasury
and waxed as a mausoleum.
ii.
From a high window across a harbour
I think about V———, a woman
wedged by writing and fragile happiness.
There is very little information about
her breakdown in 1904. For two years
after her mother’s death in 1897
she didn’t write. The desire left.
What I do know: that on her honeymoon
she read Crime and Punishment
and found the beastliness of her
marriage immensely exaggerated.
Fucko
these words these words are words that go together
well, michel michel my belle
i get wet for a turtle-neck
deleuze said my cunt was unfolding
your girl is Chaosmos
***
i am discipline michel
will you punish me well [...]
From Sappho, in a Coral Grove
(between) a whoring sea of green
spitfoam sweetly
mouthing
I think (of you_and_you
) & ask
which one of me is drowning?
Mary Craigg is a writer. She publishes her poetry under a pseudonym.