And if the ghouls dig them up again?
Then justice will perhaps be done to her when I am not here to see it.
She thought, one day, not now, not yet, I will put pen to paper and write to her, and tell her, tell her, what?
Tell her he died peacefully.
Tell her?
And the crystalline forms, the granite, the hornblende-schist, shone darkly with the idea that she would not write, that the Protean letter would form and re-form, in her head, that it might become too late, too late for decency, absolutely too late. The other woman might die, she herself might die, they were both old and progressing towards it.
In the morning she would pull on her black gloves, and pick up the black box, and a spray of those white scentless hothouse roses that were all over the house, and set out on his last blind journey.
I am in your hands.
Chapter 26
Since riddles are the order of our day
Come here, my love, and I will tell thee one.
There is a place to which all Poets come
Some having sought it long, some unawares,
Some having battled monsters, some asleep
Who chance upon the path in thickest dream,
Some lost in mythy mazes, some direct
From fear of death, or lust of life or thought
And some who lost themselves in Arcady . . .
These things are there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there. At the old world's rim
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and showed a silver tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero, Herakles
Came to his dispossession and the theft.
Far otherwise, among the northern ice
In a high frozen fastness, in the waste
Of jagged ice-teeth and tall glassy spikes
Hidden from demons of the frost and mist
Freya's walled garden, with its orchard green
With summery frothing leaves and bright with fruit
Lay where the Ases came to eat the warm
Apples of everlasting youth and strength.
Close by, the World Ash rose from out the dark,
Thrusting his roots into the cavern where
Nidhogg the dark coiled with his forking tongue
And gnawed the roots of life that still renewed.
And there too were the water and the lawns,
The front of Urd, where past and future mixed
All colours and no colour, glassy still
Or ominously turbulent and twined.
And are these places shadows of one Place?
Those trees of one Tree? And the mythic beast
A creature from the caverns of men's minds,
Or from a time when lizards walked the earth
On heavy legs as large as trees, or sprang
From bank to bank in swampy primal creeks
Where no man's foot had trod?
Was he a dark Lord whom we dispossessed?
Or did our minds frame him to name ourselves
Our fierceness and our guile, our jealous grasp
At the bright stem of life, our wounded pride?
The first men named this place and named the world.
They made the words for it: garden and tree
Dragon or snake and woman, grass and gold
And apples. They made names and poetry.
The things were what they named and made them. Next
They mixed the names and made a metaphor
Or truth, or visible truth, apples of gold.
The golden apples brought a rush of words
The silvery water and the horrent scales
Upon the serpentining beast, the leaves
All green and shining on the curving boughs
(The serpentining boughs) that called to mind
The lovely gestures of the woman's arms
Her curving arms, her serpentining arms,
The forest wove a fence of its dark boughs
For the green grass and made a sacred place
Where the gold globes of fruit, like minor suns
Shone in their shadowy caverns made of leaves
So all was more and more distinct, and all
Was intertwined and serpentining, and
Parts of one whole, they saw, the later men
Who saw connections between shining things
And next saw movements (snatch and steal and stab)
And consequential stories where the Tree
Once stood in solitude and steady shone.
We see it and we make it, oh my dear.
People the place with creatures of our mind,
With lamias and dryads, mélusines
And firedrakes, sparking, sliding, wreathing on,
We make commotion there and mystery
Hunger and grief and joy and tragedy.
We add and take away, we complicate
And multiply the foliage and the birds-
Place birds of paradise upon the boughs,
Make the stream run with blood and then run clear,
O'er grit of precious stones, diamonds and pearls
And emerald green and sapphires and anon
Wash these away and leave the pleasant sand