pocket still secretly folded. I felt like that—like someone who kept something tight inside her pocket—I couldn’t bring myself to stretch out my hand. My skin red, hot, but I had no fever. His letters in my mind, “My dear Child, I have betrayed you …” “My dear Child, we must separate forever.”
If I’d kept reading … If I hadn’t recoiled … If the words hadn’t harmed me (but how had they harmed me?)… If I could have stepped from the bushes … faced her waiting eyes … then what might have become of her and me, how might things have been different?
Claire,
My skin was burning, every thought seared red and burning. Skinner Street, the butchers’ shops, the grave, the air, his voice. Scales on my arms, parched and burning. Why did I feel such pride as I burned? (Ugly nerves, electrified, raw, flailed much too close to the air). Monarch of my own destruction. Was I showing him that no silence or withdrawal—nothing he could inflict—could rival what I inflicted on myself? That I could outdo him? Or was it he who was writing on my skin until I was all fiery scaliness and itch? Or was it all of those and more? His absence an invisible hand, willful, cruel. I lay in the burning sea of my body. Admired in secret my own fortitude. Turned my face to the wall. Spoke to no one. Scratched until I bled, then watched how the skin, temporarily and with patience, mysteriously reknit. Its smooth rebuke of me. Its desolate faithfulness, but to what?
I could read again, but not out loud.
Sometimes her mother’s hand came in air, sometimes hers. Each of them writing.
I held my books close, moved my lips as I read. The smooth or jagged letters rising in my throat, stopping short of open air. Secretive, withheld inside me.
Though my mind netted words and hauled them in, I knew even the smallest was more powerful than I:
“There are many names for rice in its different stages and qualities, e.g., Ku, the ripe grain or husk; Su, paddy; No Mi, glutinous; Mi, hulled; Fan, cooked; etc. Rice straw is employed to make paper, matting, sandals, rope, thatch, fertilizer and cattle fodder.”
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“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
∼ ∼ ∼
“But if our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us, how much more so must these millions of lives which are the essence of History, and which we know not and cannot know!”
As I read, I listened for her breathing, the click of pebbles, faint scraping on the gravestone as she left a piece of bread, though I knew I would hear nothing. I hadn’t forgotten her mother’s words: “shut out from humanity,” “How could I be such a monster?” “branded with shame,” but thought maybe I could live with them, carry them not as enemies but as companions speaking of the life I was given to live. I turned this possibility over in my mind, wasn’t sure what I thought.
I waited for her hand, often young but sometimes older, balancing, unbalancing in air. Leaving edges, marks. And I waited for her mother’s hand. But never for yours, though I carried your laboratory notes still folded in my pocket all those years—
William, Our daughter will learn to read from the letters on my gravestone-Will find the words of me but not my body— Those letters arranged, rearranged, to form a world: stone, ray, one, all, far, tower, craft. And “mar” as in to harm, as in: hamper, hinder, impair, damage—But “mar” also means the sea: Mar Roja, Mar del Norte—That far uncrossable of me—I’ll be the mar that is to trouble and perplex, to grieve—And mare: swift horse, its terrors in the night— Its said a “mare-stone” keeps away all fright, so maybe I’ll be that as well. I’ll be the “mare” which is a snarled thread. How will she ever untangle me— lost and wild in her mind I must leave her this snarl that is my self—knotted— impossible—The flat basaltic planes of the moon are “mares,” once they were considered distant seas—Nights when she looks up, fierce eyes with their perplexities and angers, she’ll see those planes of moon as me, desiccated, lifeless-Monstrous of me to leave her in this way—And yet… and yet… I feel oddly happy, but how can I be happy?—All the towers in me crumbling, only the word