was powerless, unfinished. In Queen Mab Shelley celebrated liberty, equality, critiqued the monarchy, commerce, religion. Yet the copy he gave me had been printed with his name deleted—he feared reprisals—so what liberty did he really have? What walls did he stare into? What hiddenness even in him? Even more than the poem I loved the notes best—: “beyond our atmosphere the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave.” “In one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun from the earth.” “The plurality of worlds,—the indefinite immensity of the universe, is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of seduction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deifying the principle of the universe.” He cited Nicholson’s British Encyclopedia, our father’s Enquirer and Political Justice, the Bible, Homer, Lucretius, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Sale’s Preliminary Discourse to the Koran, Rousseau … Worlds within worlds unfolding on the page before me. Seventeen notes in all. He wrote of how “we see a variety of bodies possessing a variety of powers” but we are in “a state of ignorance with respect to their essences and causes.” Wasn’t I in a state of ignorance? Though I’d strapped the one from the graveyard onto the table to control him, I was ignorant all the same of who he was, the truths of him, of what he thought and how he’d come to grow so silent. Hume, Locke, Newton, Plutarch, Lambes Reports on Cancer, Thomas Cadell’s Return to Nature or a Defense of Vegetable Regimen—I read on and on through those notes as if in challenging my mind they could tame me, maybe even make me burn or dismantle the table where I held him. Instead, I polished that table even more, tightened the straps, sharpened my instruments. Collected, hoarded, rearranged—
A few times his hand came alone. I felt like a ghost as I watched, but grew to feel a certain tenderness as well, wondered who he was.
His hand wrote feverishly, leaving cross outs and drawings. There were ink blots, water stains, burns, some on pages so small they’d fit into a pocket.
Once he filled up a whole sheet of paper with just this: Na na, na na ná na. Why would he do that?
He’d write something, suddenly stop, then weeks later write the same words in other notebooks, though not one of them was filled. Often he wrote in several at one sitting. Great swirls of words. Yet he was the one who was patient with Mary, pausing to hear her, soothe, consider.
He came in fragments just like her:
in a sea and my sail has been torn the tender and impartial love overcoming all insults and crimes
thus the life of a man of virtue and talent who should die in his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than the life of a miserable Priest-ridden slave
the laws of nature have undergone violation
Over the faint penciled words:
Yellow & black & pale & hectic red,
one day he wrote in blurred dark ink a draft of something else,
Una Favola,
which began
“l’ imagine di questa angelica donna ci sedava,
When he wrote too fast, or wrote in streaming rain (the letters blurring, misshapen), or spilled ink on his pages, I imagined making of myself for him some sort of shelter. Still, I wished him gone, remembered her hand and those pebbles, days she left chocolate, hunks of bread.
Claire,
I finally managed to shed my glass skin (to this day I’m not sure how this happened), but part of me was always in the graveyard waiting for him to come back. We live in the present and not. Days passed and years—so many visible events and changes, those outward manifestations so often mistakenly equated with a life. Our running away to France, you and Shelley walking together for hours, the village of St. Aubin among the trees, then those first days in Italy, so much that I wrote in my notebooks: “Dream my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire and it lived—I al awake & find no baby—think about it all day—Fanny comes a little before 9.” When my babies lived for a while I felt their cries, always went to them quickly. Nothing more real to me than them. Watched how they turned their infant hands in