Through another window at its opposite side the rosy-fingered dawn awakens me.
Certain mornings the phrase does happen to fit, as a matter of fact.
The houses along this beach would appear to continue endlessly, by the way. In any case infinitely farther than I have chosen to walk in either direction and still be able to return by nightfall.
Somewhere I have a flashlight. In the glove compartment of the pickup truck, possibly.
The pickup truck is at the highway. I suspect that I may have neglected to run the battery for some time, now.
Doubtless there are still unused batteries at the gas station.
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz. I no longer have any idea who she may have been, to tell the truth.
To tell the truth I would be equally hard pressed to identify Marco Antonio Montes de Oca.
In the National Portrait Gallery, in London, which is not one of the museums I chose to live in, I was not able to recognize eight out of ten of the faces in the portraits. Or even almost that many of the names, identifying the portraits.
I do not mean in the cases of people like Winston Churchill or the Brontë sisters or the Queen or Dylan Thomas, obviously.
Still, this saddened me.
And why does it come into mind that I would like to inform Dylan Thomas that one can now kneel and drink from the Loire, or the Po, or the Mississippi?
Or would Dylan Thomas have already been dead before it became impossible to do such things, meaning that he would look at me as if I were mad all over again?
Certainly Achilles would. Or Shakespeare. Or Emiliano Zapata.
I do not remember Dylan Thomas's dates. And anyway, doubtless there was no specific date for pollution.
One one eight six, the last four digits of somebody's phone number may have been.
Actually, I have never been to the Mississippi either. Going and coming from Mexico I did drink from the Rio Grande, however.
Why do I say such things? Obviously I would have had to cross the Mississippi as well, both ways, on the same trip.
Still, it appears I have no recollection of that. Or was I mad then also?
The queer selection of books that I read in that period, good heavens. Virtually every solitary one of them about that identical war.
But frequently making up new versions of the stories on my own part, too, one's fanciful private improvisations.
Such as Helen, slipping down from the battlements and meeting Achilles beside the Scamander on the sly.
Or Penelope, making love to one after another of all of those suitors, while Odysseus was away.
Wouldn't she have? Surely, with so many of them hanging about? And if it was truly ten years for the war and still another ten before that husband of hers materialized?
For some reason a part I always liked was Achilles dressing like a girl and hiding, so that they would not make him go to fight.
There is a painting of Penelope weaving in the National Gallery, actually, by somebody named Pintoricchio.
I have said that quite badly, I suspect.
One scarcely meaning that where Penelope is doing her weaving is in the National Gallery. Where she is doing that is on the island of Ithaca, naturally.
Ithaca being in neither the Adriatic nor the Aegean Sea, incidentally, but in the Ionian.
The things that do remain in one's head after all.
I should also perhaps point out that the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery are not the same museum, even though they are both in London.
As a matter of fact they are not the same museum even though they are both in the same building.
Conversely I know next to nothing about Pintoricchio, though I once knew a great deal about many painters.
Well, I knew a great deal about many painters for the same reason that Achilles must surely have known a great deal about Hector, say.
All I can remember about the painting of Penelope is that there is a cat in it, however, playing with a ball of yarn.
Doubtless the inclusion of the cat was scarcely innovative on Pintoricchio's part. Still, it is perhaps agreeable to think about Penelope with a pet, especially if I have been wrong about her and the suitors.
I should have also perhaps said long before this that I harbor sincere doubts that that war did last those ten years.
Or that Helen was the cause of it.
A single Spartan girl, as somebody once called her. After all.
But what I am basically thinking about here is how disappointingly small the ruins of Troy turn out to be.
Like little more than your ordinary city block and only a few stories in height, practically.
Well, though with people having lived outside of the citadel too, on the plains.
But still.
In the Odyssey,when she is older, Helen has a splendid radiant dignity. I read those pages two or three times, where Odysseus's son Telemachus comes to visit.
Which means I could not have been tearing them out and dropping them into the fire, as I did when I read the plays.
Meanwhile I have just been to the dunes again. For some reason while I was peeing I thought about Lawrence of Arabia.
Well, I can hardly be said to have thought about him, since I know little more about Lawrence of Arabia than I do about Pintoricchio. Still, Lawrence of Arabia did come into mind.
I can think of no connection between making a pee and Lawrence of Arabia.
There is still that frisky breeze. It is early August, possibly.
For a moment, strolling back, I may have been hearing some Brahms. I would say The Alto Rhapsody,though I doubt that I remember The Alto Rhapsody.
Doubtless there was a portrait of Lawrence of Arabia at the National Portrait Gallery.
And now I have the name T. E. Shaw in my head. But it is one more of those flitting identities that I cannot at all catch hold of.
None of that troubles me, by the way.
Very little does, as I may or may not have made evident.
Well, how ridiculous under the circumstances, should I let anything do so.
I do fret now and again, if fret is the word, over an arthritic shoulder. The left, which at times leaves me moderately incapacitated.
Sunshine is a help, however.
My teeth, on the other hand, do not speak of fifty years at all. Knock on wood, about my teeth.
I cannot remember anything about my mother's teeth, trying to think back. Or my father's.
At any rate perhaps I am no more than forty-seven.
I cannot envision Helen of Troy with dental problems. Or Clytemnestra with arthritis.
There was Cezanne, of course.
Although it was not Cezanne but was Renoir.
I have no idea, any longer, where any of my own painting materials may have gotten to, by the way.
Once during these years I did stretch one canvas, actually. A monstrosity of a canvas, in fact, at least nine feet by five. In fact I also sized it with no less than four coats of gesso.
And thereafter gazed at it.
Months, I suspect, I gazed at that canvas. Possibly I even foolishly squeezed out some pigments onto my pallet.
As a matter of fact I believe it was when I went back to Mexico, that I did that. In the house where I had once lived with Simon, and with Adam.
I am basically positive that my husband was named Adam.
And then after months of gazing set fire to the canvas with gasoline one morning and drove away.
Across the wide Mississippi.
Once in a great while I could almost see things in that canvas, however.
Almost. Achilles, for instance, in his grief after the death of his friend, when he covered himself with ashes. Or Clytemnestra, after Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter to raise wind for the Greek ships.
I have no idea why Achilles dressing like a girl is a part that I always liked.