every feeling she had of safety or danger. Now a quiet fire spreads inside my brain. My heartbeat’s too loud.
Is this what Franklin heard when he realized he’d never return? This stripped, peculiar quiet, present as anything. This colorless burn. The ones who walked barefoot over snow, having lost even their shoes, is this what they heard? And the ones who lay final and shivering in their frozen clothes.
I feel the quiet of you too. That colorless, lost place in me where once I almost knew you. No hand alights. I lose myself in whiteness, air.
Fanny,
Why do people want to write down their lives? Why did I ever do such a thing? That journal I kept, the last page is just a date, then blankness. If we burned our words, wouldn’t that make a truer picture of the mind?
I dreamed of you last night. You had no hands or feet, but smooth pink stubs completely healed, and you said they didn’t hurt (I couldn’t hear your voice yet in the dream I knew you said this. How does a person hear without hearing?—how did I hear your voice without your voice?). You were revolving in some sort of air, near earth but not touching it. Still, very close, just a few feet off the ground. The earth untouchable to you and yet your eyes took everything in. I never thought I’d dream of you again. Never thought I’d want to write your name or even say it in my head. Everything over. But you’ve come back. Or, rather, I’ve come back to you. Or both. I’ve felt an odd calm since Allegra died. I’m in Lerici, on the Bay of Spezzia, in the house called Casa Magni. The same house where they told me. I’m surprised I can stay here but I can. These past weeks—I don’t know how to speak of them—I found in silence a home but it was as if that home was burning. And yet I could live there. Herodotus said we trust our ears less than our eyes. But I trusted what I heard, which was nothing, or nothing I could use.
I watch the tide moving in and out of the bay. No walls in it, no man-made laws.
Mary lost the child. She hemorrhaged terribly and almost died. Shelley put her in an ice-bath to save her. She’s sad all the time and I don’t know how to … XXXshe says she hates it here, it’s too wild, the waves threatening to flood our ground floor … I don’t mind them, Fanny, but she …
Shelley’s boat’s almost built now.
I write these things as if I’m still alive, as if I have a stake in the world.
The quietness so loud now. I hear it more than these waves breaking against rock—
Though she’s writing again she doesn’t open her journal, just picks up scraps of paper wherever she finds them. Writes to Fanny on the back of Mary’s old accounts:
Washing–3–
Lent Paolo–9–
Washing–4–
Doctor–3–
Baths–4–
Washing–1–7 7
Writes again on the back of Mary’s reading list:
Geographica Fisica, Samson Agonistes, Tales of the East, Horace’s Epistles, Remorse.
The journal’s shut tight in the drawer like the quiet she keeps to herself while she speaks and is helpful and smiles in the house by the sea.
When she finishes writing, she holds the paper to a flame. I watch her do this night after night. The F in Fanny disappearing, then the whole word, the whole page of letters burning. (Why can I never see her face?) Liberty can’t exist apart from simplicity, she said. Is she trying to set herself free?
White curtains blow in and out. Even in darkness, white sound of sunlight, the sea.
Dear Fanny,
Night after night, feeding these pages to the flames, your name to the flames, I think of how words are an odd otherness. Us but not us. “Out of the bitterness of my mouth,” wrote the Psalmist.
Shelley and Edward Williams are missing. They sailed from Leghorn on the 8th. Now Mary and Jane have left to find out what they can.
a water cask bobbing on waves XX a small coracle dinghy
but no trace of no word of
and not secreted behind walls like Allegra not bound by heavy doors with locks and bolts and yet the harm even so the moving sea
So even liberty is a prison XXXXXXX and XXXX
The boat itself was top heavy, rigged like a frigate though extremely small “a winged miniature” someone called it, I cant remember who squall on the water squall of words inside the mind