Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  Hang on, let’s see if her pages will catch…I’ll try one from the end with nothing on it, only a bit of blotted ink with the word William shining through—that’s ’im—aye! The ash floats all right, just like that white moth she was on the first day I saw her. And now let me read ye the red diary before we leave Rydal. I’ve told ye a few bits, now here’s the rest.

  Motes, ash, softness. Dorothy’s word transmute into these, her private pages dissolve and disperse in the air—no one to know them now but myself, Sycamore, and Rydal’s bees, riding the wind.

  Do you burn the pages because her voice is strange, James? Too strange for human ears and eyes? Is that what you fear?

  Can that be the moon floating up already, while it is yet daylight? See how it hangs, caught in my top limbs, even before the sun has gone? Time!

  Time is both late and soon, my friend James. Dorothy’s death-day is growing late, and the sparks that will soon undo her pages burn with a strange, intense gold.

  Her strangeness is my home.

  Dispersal—as you know, James—is not disappearance. There was nothing dissoluble about our Rotha! The naked seed pods shiver, she wrote. The pine trees rock from their base. Comfortless was her world. Would you erase this truth? Innocent child, James Dixon, fulfilling the will of the enchanted housemaster.

  Would you like me to say now, like the god of St. Oswald’s, Well done, thou good and faithful servant…

  Quietly, stoically

  standing by

  to pick up the pieces

  as they fly…

  For you were with the little household all along, weren’t you, James, making things run as smoothly as humanly possible. While the others imagined that they did everything by themselves. Their imaginations were always the important thing.

  But the truth I know is a stranger one. As strange as Dorothy’s unspoken words.

  All right, then, James. Speak Dorothy’s words now, and set your fire to her pages. We in the garden will hold her feelings far beyond Rydal’s years, into an age you cannot see.

  I, Sycamore, feel the people listening even now, in the gold span outside our little day.

  6

  THE RED DIARY

  Wm said no & I believed him. I wrote my recollections of Scotland five times by my own hand…& I fixed it up—oh—finding the memories & placing them in the correct locations…that was a monumental task. I mean I worked hundreds & hundreds of hours on it.

  I never said it was for anybody other than our friends. It was not myself that contemplated publication. Was it?

  But—I was asked…& I—I’ve always been the same as Wm & Sam—me on my rock & Wm on his & Sam Coleridge lying on the grass between us with a blade of hay in his mouth, chewing on it & thinking, & all of us thinking. All of us thinking with one mind.

  All the same.

  That was the promise.

  It was the promise I was given: when Mary Wordsworth came it would not change—Wm & Sam & I were all one & the same. We were The Concern.

  We were the same.

  I was not different.

  I did not marry a man & become a wife. That was the promise. I would not become anyone’s wife. I would keep writing.

  …& writing, & writing. So when I asked Wm…when I said I’d been invited to publish, it took a long time for me to realize—Wm was trying to find something to say, some reason why I shouldn’t. I mean, he’d promised, had he not. We were all one & the same mind.

  You won’t like it, he said.

  The limelight. You’ll hate it. You, my dear Sister, who likes so much to hide in solitude. You’ll wilt, he said, he the one that wrapped himself up in blankets & hid in the bottom of a boat. He the one that sequestered himself away in the terraces. He the one that wore that black cloak with the red lining—& wrapped himself up in it to be invisible in the night. He the one that groaned if Little Miss Belle barked for it meant unexpected visitors. People coming to see him. Gawk at me, he’d say. Watch me & look at me. I always thought, if somebody wants to hide themselves, they will do it. No one needs to be encouraged into quietness. He had me convinced that writing & being a published writer were two different things. The first was all right but the second, he claimed he wanted nothing more in this world than to protect me from it.

  That’s the funny thing—it stopped my argument. For claiming no need of protection meant wanting. Wanting more. Wanting readers. Wanting what Wm had. There was a very dark, raven-like aspect to my brother that forbade my saying that I wanted what he had.

  So it stuck in my gullet.

  A knot at first.

  A pain. A sickness. A stab. A mute agony that grew.

  I couldn’t eat.

  Oh I could eat.

  But I couldn’t digest or be nourished.

  I held my desire back—& it was never desire for the bodily love of any man, Wm or Sam or Hazlitt or any man, not Quincey, not any man’s body, surely they knew that.

  I held myself back from my own body—of published work.

  I swallowed a big stone there, didn’t I.

  There is a me-shaped hole in the path—maybe it has a membrane. Maybe it has just been torn into the flesh of the garden & is skinless.

  At night the hole is black & by day it is green. I am an empty space. Nevertheless, people call me by name. They offer food as to a me-shaped god made of light & darkness. Little sandwiches, an orange, buns of bread, a saucer of gooseberry jam.

  If the hole that has replaced me speaks, it does so by a deep scream of one who is falling. No one can hear, for if they could, they would rush to the hole-edge, peer through, & be themselves in danger of disappearing.

  But I have not disappeared—the me-hole is visible, it is present, it is my shape, it is defined, it is both a Missing Person & a definite shape of me. I am a hole. The hole is truly myself. The hole is horrifying. Is everyone a hole & am I the only one who doesn’t mind? I don’t mind because I am with Wm & Sam, who are, no, Wm & Sam Coleridge are not holes—they are jubilant glow-worms who have eaten into the leaf of the world & made the me-hole.

  Before I was a hole, what was I?

  Slugs have green blood. So I am not a slug.

  But though I had red blood I was not a man, which I did not like & did not appreciate.

  No. The opposite of that: I am a shy body with retractable claws all along my belly: I grow fatter & more substantial, & by the end of my growth I occupy a large part of the path & cannot be got around. Everyone must halt. They consult Wm. He does not want me bodily removed or rolled aside. He has made a vow to leave me as general obstruction. You will never hear from his lips a word of complaint. Mary has asked him to build a lightweight bridge over me out of thin sticks & bits of willow. He won’t even consider it: he has secretly asked James to keep my little cart wheels & pegs maintained & ready for carriage at all times of the day or night. This does not please Mary. She would like to get a pair of shears & cut me in two halves.

  I have never been beautiful.

  We are—Wm & I—interested in roundness: the roundness of my shy-body which can be rolled up- or down-hill…& the roundness of wheels, small wooden ones, that can be placed under my body so I can be transported.

  They have already started acting on this idea of me as a me-shaped hole. A cut-out, a silhouette, a cameo disappearance. Of course, nothing could be farther from the…The membrane is not cut but torn. If you look with the micro-vision of bluebottle or even thrush, perhaps even dog or cat—it has nothing to do with domesticity blinding one—I have never cooked a single meal to be eaten sitting indoors. All you need is clear sight—wash the windows for heaven’s sake! Splash waterfall-ends into those eyes as do I.

  I hurtle through.

  All I need is to go outside, look into a green-lit space, go deeper into star-shaped bits of shade.

&nb
sp; Into spider-house geometry.

  Into gooseberry stripes.

  Into measurements of one mountain against the next.

  Around the bark of someone standing silent for its hundredth summer.

  Into the veins of a leaf map or remnant of melted stone locked red within another stone. Fur inside reeds. Rampant extravagance of perfume in the dog-rose, look closer—be proboscis suspended by wing—be all eyes in a pile like the beads of a blackberry which turn out to be fly-eye, buzz-vision, airborne Eye of membrane-held focus: the membrane made of something thin as thought.

  The membrane is flesh’s spit, blown into a bubble & cut & sewn by fingers of that Dorothy you thought had fallen down a hole, a green hole by day & a dark hole by night—Oh she did not fall down it! She is quite easy to see in there—out there—all you need is a massive eye where your hunger dwells…have you ever seen yourself with an eye, a massive eye, where your belly once sat? Some of us have replaced mortal hunger with a hunger for vision that renders us fearless, renders us without human love. For what is human love for, if not to see, together, the mathematical secrets within what dwells out-of-doors? I do not mean numbered mathematics, but umbrel & shoot as they slow-sizzle in the gas from water & sun & earth & air. Animals are quivering question-marks, like us: look at a velvet cow, how sad its peaceful restraint!

  No—we plunged our noses into the ground & breathed ground’s drug made of animate geometry. To meet the redbreast became an enregistration into the courts of the traveller-king.

  Envoy, that’s me.

  On my Scale of Decrepitude which goes from zero (Beyond Utmost Decrepitude) to 13 (The Golden Streets), every Indoors is a blundering state of being below five, with dust or crumbling bits or general malaise for its energy & none can stop me longing to go wild.

  & what of the Grim state of Manhood? First let me mention that the flowers who know Myself are, some of them, blue & tall. Others have been short & pale cream or yellow. Certain ones such as Bee Balm are red & bear fragrant leaves. All without exception have been varied & original in our conversations. People think that flowers cannot, for instance, be acerbic. This is un-insightful. I have had frequent talks with Chicory, for instance, about the Grim state of Manhood in the neighbourhood.

  As a matter of fact, there is one living in this house who would, were I to die, do all in their power to demolish every calyx, pistil, petiole, umbel, pod, anther & filament until the place be a mass of uprooted gore—this would hardly destroy the entities themselves, whose life exists in a Body that cannot be murdered.

  This imperishable Body is known about by certain people. It is not Floral but extends to bird life as well as to the un-murderable States of animals, fish & minerals, the mineral Body being elemental as opposed to fluid-animate yet force-filled & in fact basic to all other imperishable Body-forms. (Basic in the sense that there is nothing without it.)

  Red Potentilla.

  Bell-like flowers lend a ready, listening ear—Nothing could, for instance, be more sympathetic than a Delphinium bending to listen to a question put to it by myself.

  Of course, any question worth asking reverberates in a bell-ear for some timeless-time, as if it were a mouthful of mystery-wine lingering ’round the tongue of a vineyard-labourer who, in wind, sun, rain & time, has perceived more about wine’s secrets than the most revered & sophisticated Sommelier.

  But as with all forms, Delphiniums come with their particular gentle warning: Our colony slowly deteriorates with age & there is nothing you can do about it.

  Alas?

  No—triumph!

  For what can be more relaxing than the certainty that there was nothing you could have done? No recrimination here in Delphiniums’ world.

  Our wife Mary has thrown another Book on my bed admonishing me to read but I am too busy with my feelings to open it & have been busy thus for years. People are so tiresome in their mad rush to avoid all feelings whatsoever, especially the literary souls all around me—the books! The poems. The endless words. Get me out of this room, out of any book, outside. Had I known when young the things I know now, I would not have married my brother Wm.

  Oh, it was quite a wedding. He held onto the ring for ages, blessing it & walking with me & with it under the moon, itself an ever-changing ring trying to come into being: now broken, now filled with molten gold, never quite fitting on my finger because it was the moon & far bigger than any ring, farther away, & moving—always sailing around the stars & the clouds—why did I ever believe it could be made into a Husband ring & slipped on my own finger?

  Oh Wm did slip it on, all right. The replica. The ring that has forever since our wedding night—or that morning after our wedding night when he tore it off me—or we both tore it off me—where it has nestled around the finger of our wife Mary ever since!

  Mary, so perfect, like the perfect ring which is Not a perfect replica of the everchanging ever incomplete ever knowing moon.

  I am sorry, everyone will have to wait if they want me to join the epidemic of reason, the queue of propriety, manacles of safety—no more of that for me. They will have to wait outside the bars of my cage-not-cage. Only those who do not feel their feelings will look on my room, my bed, my posthumous life as some pathetic enclosure. We know—the inhabitants of my mind, & myself—me & my multitudinous winged companions, leafed companions, song-voiced familiars—we know we have bolted to freedom. It seems not thus, I know. It seems as if others are the sensible ones & I have gone somewhere inaccessible & restricted. Mary, you come to my bed with books! As if books could ever replace all amongst which I now run free.

  Poems? Oh, Wm. Poems? With their structure & gait, they are like dark horses & you barely holding the reins, but holding on, vying for control. Everyone vying for control.

  All are afraid of darkness, when all I want is for it to sweep down upon me so I can freely visit the splendours I find by following the light collected in my own mind—not imagined, no—but real sight—I always had it & that is why I found it impossible to enter a room of people chattering away about the things in that room. Arguing over tea-sets or the Turkish carpet or the curtains or who was coming down over the road in a new hat.

  Take all that away!

  I should have shouted this when I was—at what age did it become unbearable? For when we were young, Wm, Sam & I—there was no Turkish carpet, only the frost hung like diamonds in the trees. Gems upon gems. They could see it. Once upon a time…& then something—did it blind them? What blinded them & did not blind me, so that I had to—I was the one who had to hold the gem-world fast when all around me, all the so-called faithful men around me, had become—Can I say faithless?

  Oh I don’t care anymore what I say to our wife Mary, to all proper ladies of the vale—give me Miss Barker. Give me the young men I loved, who were wild & not tame. My feelings might be too much with me but I’d rather that a thousand times than suffer the pallid consequence of focusing on a book Mary would have me read, or on any of the things coming out of people’s pale & monstrous mouths. Laudanum! Oh yes it was convenient at first for me to take that, it shut me up & kept me quite happy, in their minds, didn’t it. The poppy. The brandy. The diffusion of all sharp things. Well give me the sharp things now. Give me my sword. Get that nurse out of here or I will knock her on the head once more—yes I mean it. I do mean it. I do for once mean it. Oh yes.

  What is love? You think I was a spurned lover? You think Wm’s cracked wedding vow was about my not having a husband in the earthly sense? When will you know by looking into my eyes that nothing in me whatsoever is or ever has been or ever will be about earthly sense? How is it you can’t see? It’s because the world is too much with you, yes, late & soon, yes late & soon & all time that is not time. Getting & spending you lay waste your powers, yes, you have given your hearts away, a sordid boon, amen. Little we see in Nature that is ours…We? No. Speak for
yourselves. What happened to you? You crowd of lost traitors, bereft imbeciles—I am speaking to you now from my saddle on the back of a bat.

  Excuse me, what was it you wanted?

  Have you people not learned how to get along without me yet? A button sewn on? A transcription of your latest thoughts for the papers?

  Hello?

  Have you not noticed something is different? It has been some time now since I felt able to pretend to care about any of that. As a matter of fact, it has been seventeen years, twenty-one days, two hours, thirty-seven minutes & seventeen seconds since I cared about your own personal situation. The children have long grown up, or at least they have ceased to need me the way you appear to still need me, or the facsimile of me that you have created for your…shall we call it your convenience?

  I have been a convenient person to have around, loving as unreservedly as I do, or did. Forbearance has been important to me & I know you will agree it has helped this household. Funny that they call it a house-hold & not a house-drop. Not a house let-go. Not a house fallen downhill, & not a house released.

  Hold me in your house.

  Yes, you have done that, thank you.

  You did it & I was supposed to find that sufficient. Was. I was a convenient person to have around, but now how things have changed.

  Womanliness!

  What is womanliness? I thought I knew, or I thought I might know. Until Mary Lamb went mad from too much of it—let’s see, what happened again? Ah, yes—her grandma died so Mary & her family could no longer go to the country & were stuck in a small London flat. Who did Mary Lamb, in all womanliness, look after? Her mother, paralyzed in her body, slept in bed with her like an unmoving log of hate. The mother who had never shown her any love, not even when she was a babe & her brother John had an accident & an infected fever which Mary Lamb tended because she loved him, & her beloved brother Charles, like my own beloved Wm, was away away in the days, away from the little cramped flat. Away on his own important business. Though he said he loved her—& her father in the flat as well, completely demented, & she had to look after him & her grandmother dead so that the house in the country was no longer a place to which she could escape, & she the only source of an income for the household, sewing cloak after cloak amongst the rest of them & their clamour. Who would not have a temporary frenzy?