The Flower Arrangement in the Window of Jane Austen’s
Writing Room
Late Spring sunlight through
thick beveled glass, garden
arrangement of blue iris, dried
wildflowers and lavender stalks
nearby low writing table, scuffed
and tarnished by decades of use,
abuse, seems almost child-sized,
fit for coloring books, find a word
puzzles, Suduko, instead of
escritoire for timeless, of a time,
novels: Pride and Prejudice, Sense
and Sensibility, Persuasion…..
writings she hid from family and
friends heard outside her writing
room door or seen through this same
scratched glass where lilting flowers fade.
Outside the room where Jane
wrote, her sister Cassandra’s
letter describing last hours of
her best friend, companion,
literal sister of the soul, in stilted
handwriting no doubt made less
legible by stress and grief, weathered
now, rust stained, fading so,
a transcription of the text renders
what can no longer be read in prose
as elegant and as poignant as Jane ever
wrote. The rooms and hallways
scented now with garden grown flowers,
dried lavender; the room beyond where
Jane wrote enlivened by fresh picked
blossoms grown nearby, a legacy, like
the words, living on.
The Black Marble Statue in the Winchester Cathedral Basement
of a stooped back man bent
from laboring here among
the well-washed stones still
damp from months ago, early
Spring floods that covered his
knees, watermarks signifying
the depth and breadth of his
Herculean labors, bucket by bucket
up narrow, winding stairs;
the agony of it all evident in
those finely sculpted lines,
his presence a hard shadow
of all those relics, ancient and new,
the dead and the dying, for those
who ask for Commiseration:
for Liz who has fits, for the children
who suffer through no fault
of their own, for my son and my
daughter who are afflicted by
the drink and cannot find their
way home.
Work Anxiety Dream #5: In the Lake District
First orders come from
above through murder holes
drilled into the floor where
the main bar sinks overflow
and the slop sinks leak.
The waitress is sleeping,
head down on the invisible
cellar bar while a rush of
patrons arrive, walking single
file down misaligned stairs,
chanting verses from a Pink Floyd
song, shouting out orders as they
pass into the well-lighted, unfinished
basement lounge. Second orders
come over the bar from everywhere
at once but all the bottle are
somewhere else, up flights of stairs
others are using, all the taps open
and free flowing but the glassware
is inaccessible in too tall, overhead
racks, in too low cabinets you have to
lie down next to in order to retrieve
what lies within, reaching hands
scraped and bleeding on rough hewn
wooden shelves, on the chipped and
broken glass, still more orders come
and there is no room to move,
the basement ceiling pressing down,
more murder holes being drilled,
delivering last orders from above.
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