on to describe the portable furnace stoked with wood; the difficulty of fully incinerating a corpse out in the open … wine, oil, salt making the yellow flames jump up and glisten … how the heart didn’t burn and he reached in and took it…
Sometimes that man, Roberts, the one who found the boat, is standing in front of me. He shows me a trunk filled with Shelley’s books and clothes. Tells me they found a hamper of wine that Shelley bought at Leghorn, the corks partly broken; wine and sea water mixed in together. He reaches out his hand to me and in it are two memorandum books of Shelley’s, perfect, undamaged. Then he points to a pile of books at his feet, tells me he’s cleaned them—mud had glued the pages together.
I work as a governess. Yesterday I taught the children about Lavoisier’s system of Molecules and the experiment he tried with roses. A red rose washed with muriatic acid becomes perfectly white. Then, viewing it through a microscope, you can plainly see how the molecules which had been lying one way when the rose was red, have been decomposed and now in the white rose are lying quite another way.
I think of such rearrangement often—
Sometimes your name turns to air inside me. Mary. Air. The “M” dropped off and the “y” fled away. And my own name, too, mostly now just air. Or not quite that, maybe, but what are we now, the two of us? What were we then? This snow falling heavily as I think of you, as I so often do, even though you’ve had no word from me for so long.
Tonight I see the dark window behind her, white curtains pulled back, and for the first time since I’ve watched her she looks cold, a blue blanket thrown over her nightdress as she writes:
Smirna in Russian means gentle. “smirnyi”—quiet, peaceful, from mir peace (I say this to myself every morning but don’t feel it)
Dear F
and a {thin} veil before the mind and all things which destroy
(Shelley gave me his shawl, it’s all I have left of him)
Her lost face always her lost face a table in the wilderness this seclusion shipwreck of mind
I see so many unhappy people I can’t complain of the singularity of my fate
Then:
There was a well-known drink in Greece from Homer’s time onward, the kyke&n—it was made by stirring barley and grated cheese into a cup of wine, and since these couldn’t dissolve the whole mixture had to be kept in motion until it was drunk. Heraclitus says our world is like this drink. Existing things aren’t at rest. Strife is the nature of the world. So justice IS strife.
always the waves at Lerici the wind at Lerici—
The window whitens a little, fills with swirls of snow. Her hands—deliberately, slowly—fold a piece of paper into quarters, then eighths. She writes M. Gambs on the outside, lays her head on the pillow, tries to sleep.
All night the same dizzying dream: You’re washing my cells in muriatic acid like Lavoisier’s rose. I feel them rearranging themselves and their directions. Then I’m looking through a microscope, taking notes, as you took notes on me. What, precisely, am I documenting? Does it matter if the cells of the white rose are different from the red? Why does it matter? No one has explained this to me. Still, I feel I should take notes as you did. Then I’m standing on a great plain of ice. Your hand, warm as breath, is nearby me, though I see no trace of you. The air’s perfectly clear.
On Parry’s second Arctic voyage, the ice grew so vast—icebergs two hundred feet high, pancake ice and bay ice—he decided to winter over near Winter Island. “One day a very beautiful ermine walked right up onto our deck, though we were over four hundred yards away from land.”
With so much pared away he believed he saw more clearly: “In the fire-hole kept open in the ice alongside us, multitudes of small shrimp rose and cleaned—in the most beautiful manner—any skeletons to be found there. The bones, turned the color of salt, were wholly smooth. Each day I watched this cleansing as if it were a ritual or prayer.”
As each night I watch her planning her lessons in her attic room, snow filling the window, thickening on the sill. Sometimes I wish she could see me or that I still had a voice with which to reach her. But maybe it’s