What words, then, would I use for you? Or for that hand—delicate—which comes to me so often now in air?
(And if it’s true we’re born into reason and language, but are we? If attitudes are pictures, or … And what are “tender” subjects?)
“A cold fire envelops me,” he wrote. “The icy oceans are burning.”
(But there can be no proof of… And so few traces of who anyone has been. Is a voice a thing that flees, then vanishes? I want only to read.)
Lomonosov believed in the fluidity of bodies, that although the universe is stable, what dwells within it isn’t isolate or unchanging. Nothing’s purely itself but exists in relation to others. When an object moves another it’s transferring its force to the one it touches, so nothing’s ever really lost.
If you could have seen me in that way, believed my existence diminishes nothing, subtracts from the world exactly nothing. (And my voice long fled … this vague fever I feel… this sense of shame even now.)
I look out on all this whiteness. The frozen port he saw as a boy. Did he think he could walk over snow all the way to Moscow? Where will I travel to, and how? If true North’s unreachable—but I don’t believe it’s unreachable. What will I find if I get there? What vowels rise in my mind, the tender ones, the harsh?
Why do I even speak these things to you? You who I never see and never will.
Lately when I close my eyes I see only this: a woman’s white sleeve, her hand moving across a page, writing. The hand leaves steady markings in its wake—light chestnut-brown or black or darker brown. Sometimes it crosses out words, sometimes whole sentences, builds fences of x‘s, drops ink stains on the page. Sometimes it turns the paper to the side, writes over and across words already left there. Or it halts as if netted, a sudden clenching of the tendons at the wrist. The first few times I could see little of the page but now that’s changing.
Each night I wait for it—that white sleeve gathered at the wrist, that small determined hand. I read what it leaves:
Tonight I’m remembering Snow Hill. They called me Jane then, not Claire. Mother and Godwin never once called me Claire. Cold nights under flimsy blankets—as if that very name, Snow Hill, was seeping into the walls and through my bones. The square where the public executions were held stood barely 100 feet from our front door. The year we arrived (I was 9) they hung Haggerty and Halloway for the lavender merchant’s murder. 28 people were trampled and suffocated in the crowd. Mary and I barely slept, thinking of that crush of feet like cattle’s hooves, and all those faces suddenly unable to breathe, mouths useless holes. Afterwards I walked down the street alone, past the milliner shops, furriers, coffee dealers, wondering what strange creatures we are to inflict such things on ourselves. Minds contaminate themselves and actions grow ruinous. I feel this in myself—ruin prodigious and luxuriant as plant-life. It flourishes, this crumbling, this destruction, and yet there’s also—
It was around that time I searched through Mother’s things for my birth certificate. But it seems there’s no record of my birth or baptism. Some say she was put in a debtor’s prison shortly after I was born (so was I in that debtor’s prison too?) then relieved and set free through a charitable subscription. A few years later she met Godwin. I’ve no name for my father. Maybe it’s better this way.
Snow Hill—I still feel its coldness in my bones, and how after a while I wanted only to leave. Though I loved the books on the shelves and sometimes the eyes that watched me, the eyes I watched back. How watching is a kindness and a shackling both. The chain of it, the net, the binding. And I remember, above the doorway, the stone face of Aesop reading.
Seawater ice holds my weight when I walk, but black ice is thin, can’t be trusted. Sometimes I don’t know which one I’m on. The wind’s a fist in my mouth. I bend down, huddle on the ground, try only to breathe. Or I come back inside, say her name to myself: Claire. Air.
Why do I wait for her?—that hand and the walls of ink it builds and leaves.
Claire. Air. Care. Clear. Claire.
At first glance the hand’s delicate, but I see now the finger bones