The Vorrh

time, she seriously considered breaking their contract, of giving up his mother’s money and fleeing his baleful presence. But she stayed for him, knowing that without her, his life with the indifferent servants would be even worse. His death was the enigma that stalked her life, and she came to recognise that it was not the tangled weight of responsibility that made her care and kept her close; it was something stronger, something strangely unnecessary and totally essential; a kind of love; a constant need to contain and guard with unflinching proximity. It was not maternal, and was certainly not fed by perversity from the injuries of his brutality. It was her presence which had become entangled with his, beyond circumstance and sometimes even personality. She would stay until the end and remove all judgement to do so.
    She remembered a conversation she had once heard in her childhood. She was nestled under the thick legs of dark furniture, while a Jewish relation explained stories of his faith. He talked about many peculiar and difficult things, but one stuck in her young mind: the division of day and night, and how dusk and dawn had two characteristics, the twilight of the dove and the twilight of the raven. She now understood that the rest of their time together would be like this, a constant dusk. She would maintain it, and work on its luminance. It would be the twilight of the dove, and the raven would never be allowed in.

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    1 Abbreviated name for any kind of engine or mechanical contrivance, as in cotton gin
.
    2 Noxious fog that sometimes thickened with soot and sulphur dioxide into a greenish-blackish smog
.



PART THREE

“In some country everyone is blind from birth. Some are eager for knowledge and aspire after truth. Sooner or later one of them will say, ‘You see, sirs, how we cannot walk straight along our way, but rather we frequently fall into holes. But I do not believe that the whole human race is under such a handicap, for the natural desire that we have to walk straight is not frustrated in the whole race. So I believe that there are some men who are endowed with a faculty for setting themselves straight.’”
    Nicholas of Autrecourt , Exigit ordo
“The grandiosity of ‘paper buildings’ like Brueghel’s tower of Babel, Boullee’s funerary temples, Piranesi’s prisons, or Sant’Elia’s Futurist power stations have been realized, and by an amateur, a fanatically motivated little lady from New Haven whose dream palace was crafted with Yankee ingenuity.”
    John Ashbery

“…and as the disputational .44
occurred in his hand and spun there
in that warp of relativity one sees
in the backward turning spokes
of a buckboard,
    then came suddenly
to rest, the barrel utterly justified
with a line pointing
to the neighborhood of infinity.”
Ed Dorn ,
Gunslinger
    He stood before the oval mirror, combing his beard. He had lost weight again, and the furrows under the white strands looked dark grey, deep rills and valleys in a late, gaunt sliver of moon. He wore his finest shirt, one he had bought in Jermyn Street, at London’s most renowned tailor, The Consort’s own shirt-maker. There was a flicker in the peeling glass, tarnished silver curling away from the polished transparency, the shadow of a woman passing. He ignored the unimportant flicker of the past and looked closely at himself, catching the roaming eyes for a moment and holding them out of focus, not wanting to see into their meaning. The glass had warped since the time of his wife, become thin since her fatness had moved away. Perfumed colour and greasy powder no longer wallowed in its gilt frame; now, it was only the empty grey of his eyes reflected in its shallows, sphinctered tight against search or understanding.
    The doorbell rang: his carriage had arrived. He donned his surtout coat, picked up his cane and his new formal day hat and hurried for the door, his old bones creaking against the speed. He was on his way to meet the Grand Dame, and he must not be late.
    The carriage rattled as he held tightly to his stick, jittering with excitement and nerves; he had always wanted to meet her. She had sent the request through the Stanfords, inviting him to take tea with her on this bright March day. He was fascinated by her diminutive beauty and gigantic wealth, having seen the former many years before, across a ballroom as he passed through the garden. She was not a classic beauty, like one of the willowy Long