Excerpts from Livings
YOU AND EMILY
Picture that proper Georgian house-front
on a damp Summer night:
its upper-story windows
blank and dark
except for the middle one,
lit by pale lamp-flame. Within,
on a cot below the sill, you’ll see
a black-and-tan spaniel. And a larger dog,
all golden fur and dark jowls,
sleeping at the feet
of a seated human figure, bent
intently on a notebook in her lap. Just then
your hand slips,
tapping the rain-wet pane,
and the figure lifts her head
and you are seen. But not to worry:
fancying you a figure
from her own imagination, she
will nod at you and smile,
then bend back to the pages in her lap. After all,
she is used to this sort of thing.
Originally published in Wuthering Heights and Me (a special bicentennial issue of the Brontë Society Gazette, Fall 2018).
NORTHANGERLAND
The innkeeper’s daughter, sweet and twenty,
hands young Branwell
her commonplace book and a quill,
and asks him to inscribe.
For another whiskey-punch,
he will. And while she’s off to fetch it
he indites, from memory,
his two most recent sonnets—
appending as a jest
his favorite nom-de-plume,
NORTHANGERLAND:
that scoff-God, that untrammeled
ravener of women and liquor,
hero of the young man’s
unfinished novel—
and offers the girl her book again,
in payment for the draught she’s brought.
But now, for a moment,
he is Northangerland,
appraising the swell of her frock
at hip and bosom, the fetching
tilt of her flaxen-haired head
as their fingertips touch…
then just as quickly
un-bethinks him,
his mind drawn
back to that One
he tells himself he loves
most in this world, and yet
may never see again. And sighs,
as it were his last breath
he were yielding up,
and takes his re-filled glass
but not the hand that gave it.
Originally published in Four Poets and Me (special bicentennial issue of the Brontë Society Gazette, Fall 2017).
MEMORANDA
(Parson Brontë, making a new entry in his household accounts, peruses the book)
In Sept 1847—I got the
well clean’d by a pumbr
and two men for 5/ —d.
The water was Tainted
yellow by eight tin
cans, in a state of
decomposition—It had
not been cleaned for
twenty years, before—
And thus I know I shall not Live
to need it cleaned again!
Always, when necessary,
get a Receipt—or pay
before witnesses, and
make a memorandum.
Wise advice, I have ever believed,
and so Preserved it here…
Keep every Page of this
book, for the sake of reference—
… not least for Mariah, as I thought,
in case of absence from her. Gone herself
these six and Twenty years—
I pd Wm Tetley Esqr
no—46—Westcat
Bradford, Yorkshire
the £50:0:0, which I
owed him since 1821,
in the presence of Mrs
Tetly, & his son, and
burnt the note.
Ah, William—kindly William—
a parish Clerk then, only, but lent me
(it must have been) a twelvemonth’s of his wages!
With what but faith
to tell him that a recent widower
in debt already for the funeral—
not to Speak of all the doctors’ bills before it—
might be able, ever, to repay?
Yes, William:
truly, in my need, thou hast upheld me!
And so Patiently, as well,
to wait out nine long years
without a shilling on installment.
Such soft terms Reproached me,
as perhaps you acknowledged
by your bending to my insistence upon
a binding written instrument.
When this filled, put
it into the trunk, with the
Others—and procure a
new Memorandum Book.
These little accomptings
of my debts and their acquittals
are my fortune and my independency,
and all the Earthly treasure
I have laid up for my children:
the Example itself of a good name
one may tender as confidently
as coin or bank-note.
Originally published in Harbinger Asylum, Winter 2020.
SUNRISE OVER THE SEA
though it would do as well
for a sun-set,
Anne supposes:
barely able now to recall
that decade-younger self
she’d placed, in her picture, on shelving cliffs
above a tranquil, gull-strewn cove.
The girl she was that day
had never seen the sea
she would experience at Scarborough
in the years between,
its thundering breakers
and constant, glittering motion
more sustaining to her
even now, in memory,
than any food or breath
she can force
her fading body to take.
Her back to us,
hand shielding her eyes,
the pencilled figure gazes calmly
across the path of gleaming water
from the rocks she stands on
to that warm resplendent Sun
whose beams, like spreading arms,
now wave away night,
clouds, horizon,
doubts
about the journey
yet to go.
Originally published in Anne Brontë and Me (special bicentennial issue of the Brontë Society Gazette, Fall 2021).
Photo Credit: Haworth Parsonage and Church, pre-1878, English Photographer, Haworth, Yorkshire, U.K. © Brontë Parsonage Museum /Bridgeman Images.