Dancing with Mary Shelley and Henry James
A Cleave Suite
the phantasmagoric audience – all of them having
strangely - the same face
takes the stage, - multiples of one man
acting all the parts - a replicating fantôme
in the dark - populating the nightscape
of dreaming’s Cartesian theater – by morning melting away
withdrawing into daylight - uncovered by lightless night
The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and
scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance — all strewn
with crumpled playbills …
the entity - I
the first person – me or mine
is it separate or – just a named hallucination
a wave in a sea of they – a drop of rain
Whisper Your Name Three Times Into the Wind and It Will Go
to that imaginary land of – signs
titles, drawings & stories - of love
songs alluding to – April’s fragrance
facsimiles of – r e a l sun
showerless – showers
counterfeit flowers - bees in the buddleia
always a step away from sensations – feelings and real places
nothing is wonderful but the word - W O N D E R
leaving behind a sigh - a n e x h a l A t i o n
whose name blew away – on a windy day
a word as virtual as signified snow – let it rise as a whisper and go
I saw the master — nothing could be more evident — in the light of an intense
emotion,and I trembled, I remember, in every limb, while at the same time, by a
blest fortune, emotion produced no luminous blur, but left him shining indeed,
only shining with august particulars.
I busied myself with – concocting a tale
a story – that would speak to
mysterious – fears
awakening dread – quickening the blood
I saw a body – made of ghastly fragments
stolen from a graveyard – showing signs of animation
moving eerily – due to its creators skill
the pale student of unhallowed arts – making that progeny conscious
cackling in triumph – alive at last
I caught him, yes, I held him — it may be imagined with what a passion; but at
the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held.
seemingly normal – nodding responses
but hollow inside – cognizant, bright
having no lack of – emotional
affects yet not – conscious of being
a self – in a condition of
rather uncanny – I-less life
cloned with indifference or cloned with a difference
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the
obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a
strange tale should essentially be.
despite disaster - this single thing
language remains – survives the damage
panic forms – phrases
sentences – take shape
writing alone escapes – from nothing’s pure night
so
let us go then you and I – along with our alters
under the Titian-white sky
what is the nouveau siècle to its whyless wide
to its dumb sun
all of us subsequents – formed by the story
until the text ends
Wonderful was it thus to see, and thrilling inwardly to note, that since the
question was of personal values so great no faintest fraction of the whole could
succeed in not counting for interest.
