Voices from the Past Part 116

I thought: who are his friends? The thought cut me: the Great Lucifer is forgotten. Look around you. The liar is captive, will die behind these walls. They say he concocts an elixir, and gives it to his friends. No, I was not included. He needed his elixir more than I.

His white head was dirty...where was his youth? No, he had concocted hope. People said his rooms would be un- guarded...so they were. But I made no sound. The ugly Tower was still. What has happened to his Elizabeth: is she memory?

I wanted to talk to him about Spenser's Faerie Queen, and say...Spenser...you know...no, Raleigh sailed to the Canaries, to Florida, Manoa...Hispaniola...cloak- thrower...knight...names...and his map, a large parchment, came out of the wall and stared at me, rebuking me: cloak-thrower...patron...names...John White said that he admired him...John White said...where was White now, now that he's back from Roanoke?

Pushes hand through hair, coughs... I back away, wanting to put the wall between us. I shuffled down a few steps, disgraced, down to the street, c.o.c.kroaches and rats scuttling, ivy blowing in the wind.

Let him finish his History of the World.

I had no right to disturb.

The blue cloak slips from Ellen's shoulders and through the stabbed hole I see moon, stars, and fog, each flecked with red. Fog soaks the hole and then, then, there's the face of an attacker, scarred, piratical. Something behind him fades into her face, so white. I see her smile her dazzling lover's smile and I hear her laughter and the sound of her bracelets.

In the funeral procession

a small black casket is accompanied by Ann, Shakespeare,

his daughter in black, and others.

A flower falls from the casket and Shakespeare

picks it up and puts it in his pocket:

A church bell tolls:

Blue cloak over a tombstone.

I

buried Hamnet, buried father, buried myself... What is this death that eats our lives as if we were pieces of bread on a dirt plate, sacrificed to whim and time? Our crosses top a hill, row on row, a row for each generation, across fog hills, across sunny hills, Ital- ian, French, English, Scot.

Escape with me:

Now at the prow, now in the waist,

the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement:

sometimes I'd divide and burn in many places,

on the topmast, the yards, the bowsprit...

Henley Street

September 23, 1615

Now, now thought is closer to death than love: I live in it, longing for her, for intercourse, the ice of this winter-house aging me and the wind, poor wind, scuttling nowhere, nowhere to go.

Go to the oriel, then.

Henley Street

September 24

G.o.d, the rain, the rain at its cobble-sop, common rain on cobbles, rising out of them, climbing the ivy, moulding thatch, hurting places of the mind, s.h.i.+vering our secrets, insinuating with lashes, coming again and again, thieving.