we are … The brain schooled and netted by such distance. Things happen apart from us and we make them our own. Our history. The texture of memory, breath.
Allegra, Shelley … they’re never coming back (their deaths at a distance invisible and wholly real).
Trelawny said came yesterday XXXX He said first there was no sign of anything. Then a punt, a water keg, some bottles on the shore. No other trace for seven days. Until, near Via Reggio, a body washed up, and then another was found three miles farther on near the tower of Migliarino. Shelley and Williams. No sign yet of their sailor boy, Charles Vivian.
Shelley’s face and hands were fleshless. XXXX But in one jacket pocket there was a volume of Sophocles, and in the other a book of Keats’s poems, pages doubled back.
Mary said Trelawny was kind not to try to console her—that would have been too cruelly useless.
The medieval author of the Ancrene Wisse instructed the anchorite sisters not to look down at their pure white hands but to dirty them each day with the soil that would one day be their graves.
If the mind can be stained and soiled by what it knows, by what it’s forced to know, I feel mine so covered now, so saturated, as any pair of hands XXXXXX
So why do I still see so much ice in my mind (not this dirt I think of daily, this dirt I feel covered with and stained by) though I know if I placed my hand on that ice just one time the skin would burn and stick and the fingers freeze—
For a long time she doesn’t come. Then one day I see a page (it looks like part of a journal, though I thought she no longer keeps one—Fanny why do people think to write down their lives?). It says only: Sunday May 7th at three or four o’clock.
Another day I see: having {lost every object of} buried here every thing {may the eye}
{relieve the eye} Appennines darkened black clouds
Then:
Head.
a Large
Medicinalräthin. Alessandro Manzoni.
author of the Conte di Carmagnola
fiss—1 fedelin
fidelin
Angella
All very strange, what could she be thinking? I see all this but not her hand.
For a while when I started to glimpse more of her, her shoulder, her arm, the dark back of her head, I thought I might one day see her face. Now that feels foolish.
I don’t know where she is. Or why her hand is lost to me. Except that grief brings with it great quietness and absence (this I know from when you left me). It takes the mind away from the mind. Abducts the world from the world.
If I wait will she come back? But how could I not wait? Isn’t it this waiting (I think of all those times I saw her hand) that links me, such as I am, to the world.
It’s a small volume of Russian manufacture bound in brown leather. On the inside cover, some Russian words, and Mary’s addresses. She’s in Moscow. (How long since I last saw her?)
Teusday
(she always misspells Tuesday)
May 12–24
(but there’s no year next to these dates)
I have long resolved to keep a journal again and so today have finally provided myself with a book.
When I first came here there seemed no power in myself to keep me alive (every gust of wind recalls Lerici)
I spend half the day not sending letters. Few here know who I am.
Her hand’s moving again. Her sleeve white against white curtains in what looks like a small attic room. Her head turned from me as always. There’s a lit candle on the desk but she doesn’t hold her pages to the flame.
Mary,
I’m in Moscow. I suppose I’m only continuing what Trelawny called my “compulsive emigration to the North.” A year since I’ve written you …
Three years since Shelley’s body was burned on the shore.
Sometimes Trelawny’s still standing in front of me, explaining what happened. How three white wands had been stuck in the sand to mark where the body was, and still they had trouble finding it when they returned. How Shelley would have loved the place—not a single human dwelling in sight. And how Trelawny felt he was no better than a dog or a wolf as he tore the “battered body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it.” I wonder if you hear those words coming back to you unwanted and unasked for as I often do. Just the way he told us. And how he went