Shoehorn

more than you know. a cradle (to put it lightly) of pleasure for your nearness. forgive me. i am an old wheel (& nothing less). close your legs, please. keep the night between us kiss.ing. dirt-faced & bare in a room not our own. generous thief stuck straight by measure. you asked me to church & nobody will stop me. ninetythree steps the devil crept & upon the whole he suddenly became me. it was there that i fell in the red-edged glories of H— my doubt of doubts: is that your voice? give over your fiend (the others long have) for whose proud song is here&now / we know / O we know... but how do i tell you; the night is an age when no one of me ever turned the edge of life like a mind without a body (asleep i believe) & only smiled in vain.

Mollusk i.

Haworth, November 1904. It was rash to wait for fine weather, cowardly; for in the daylight the striking loneliness of the Yorkshire moors could not impress on her how far surroundings radically affect people’s minds.

A sentimental traveller with so clear an image of Haworth from print and picture. Her excitement as she approached the town took an element of suspense; as though upon arrival she would meet some long-separated friend, who might have changed in the interval.

She felt justified in her pilgrimage to the home of Charlotte Brontë and her sisters. Undoubtedly her curiosity is legitimate.

Look! What countryside! It is the parish and parsonage and the school where Charlotte taught and the Bull Inn where Branwell drank

that collectively seem to add something to her understanding of their books.

The tow, dingy and commonplace

and the vast, undulating moors framed the Brontës as much as the Brontës expressed the Northern gloom, knuckled together like a snail’s soft body to its shell.

And it is here, in the museum as Charlotte is examined under glass through an assemblage of autographs and epistles, scraps and sketches that the dead woman comes to life by way of a wedding dress and a pair of little cloth boots.

These personal relics, which so confound the natural fate of such things to die before the body that wore them, cause us to forget the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer.

“Her shoes and her thin muslin dress have outlived her!” she said

and grimly hedged by a cemetery of keepsakes the homestead waned as a treasury and waxed as a mausoleum.

ii.

From a high window across a harbour I think about V———, a woman wedged by writing and fragile happiness.

There is very little information about her breakdown in 1904. For two years

after her mother’s death in 1897 she didn’t write. The desire left.

What I do know: that on her honeymoon she read Crime and Punishment

and found the beastliness of her marriage immensely exaggerated.

Fucko these words these words are words that go together well, michel michel my belle

i get wet for a turtle-neck deleuze said my cunt was unfolding your girl is Chaosmos ***

i am discipline michel will you punish me well [...]

From Sappho, in a Coral Grove

(between) a whoring sea of green spitfoam sweetly mouthing I think (of you_and_you ) & ask which one of me is drowning?