Through Thomas Hardy Country
The subway sways us, you and I: husband and wife, huddled against pedestrian strain
Above ground; chalk art dissolves in rain and we take refuge in the National Gallery.
You take my hand
Walls of paintings stare and I
stare back with violent affection at Renaissance moms holding fat naked babes. In shades of Lapis and crimson, colors so bright, I’m not worthy of this room
Husband, you don’t want kids. You have your hobbies to make you free.
But what about me? I’m a hostage in this body. A hostage in our home. Hostage in this room of mocking moms and Virgin Mary with her perfect Christ babe at her breast
I see the nail in the palm of older Jesus and I know this marriage will never heal.
And so we talk of divorce and the gallery spins so fast, like a child playing carelessly, spinning my globe on its axis so fast oil paintings heave and ooze and Mary and her perfect babe come undone. Stains me
____________________________________
You fly home while I drive the south downs of England, home of my forefathers and mothers whose breath still hangs hot on the air. Hot on me with their wish to carry their lineage
Even they tell me to leave
I’m bound for a Thomas Hardy Conference. Call this my literary pilgrimage. Call this my distraction.
It’s night and the storm wants to swallow my rented Fiat or flip it. The same wind sending Thomas Hardy inside to write in extremes. Tree boughs bend and bow past dairy farms, beyond heather shaking her purple fists at the earth
It’s the last night in Eden after the world began to fall. And I, like Eve, am determined to do what I must.
The boggy night comes through my window. So near now, its breath comforts me from deep in the gloaming. Out there in Dorchester, past moss and heather is the lost virgin! Call her Tess; call her Bathsheeb.
Call her me.
Hardy’s characters only wanted love and warmth. One to lean on when winter came. Tess took refuge in that like me, ill-advised.
Oh Tess! The accident: lulled asleep by lantern sway. A wounded horse. And Bathsheba too, a spinster. Fumbling, fleeing and finally trapped: hem in a soldier’s spur. Troy: the wrong man at the right time?
Jumped anyway and love undressed her petal
by petal by petal, petal by,
changing her reliable course.
Maybe if she’d waited? Tuned her ear to her pulse: the only pulse that really mattered, that tiny and ineffable drumbeat of happiness
wait to marry, it beat, like hummingbird wings
or… get out sooner.
But is loving truly ever tragic? Isn’t hoarding love most tragic of all? Ever waiting for the mythical he, around the corner from she?
What if what we want most in life never arrives?
Living requires equal measure of waiting and surrender, and we may never be sure
so we jump again and again
Go ahead, toss the dice.
Don’t tell me to regret marriage. Though by day it was the death of a thousand childhood dreams
because at night, I came to life in your arms.
But the questions still remains, sharp as flint. Requires an answer. These are Thomas Hardy questions. These, I hold to.
What to do now with the knowledge of good and evil gained from the fruit of the tree of life?
— — — — — — — — —
I arrive late near a barn. Hay after rain. Enter to the low murmur of intellectuals ‘round fire and food.
“Our American is here!” Says the woman in charge, as if if the’ve waited. Like I’m a star. Like no one has waited on me for years.
And we read Hardy poetry after wine and on the steps under brollies and under the wide arms of trees and in our beds alone by candlelight. We speak of the Eternal Will. I befriend a white-haired man. An orphan, he confessed. His mom, like Tess, stifled by social expectation. She gave up her need, her own flesh, because the world demanded it.
Don’t I feel this way? Staying married, though my arms are empty and you still refuse me passage
Husband, what are you so afraid of? What we’d plant that you can’t retract? Am I such a bad woman? There’s my age, but there’s always invitro, or adoption.
Being bound to this mad indecision, to this fork in the road, is my deepest grief.
Why didn’t you tell me before we married?
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Back at the National Gallery, you give a quid to the man beside the dissolving chalk art. I take your hand to comfort you, because you’re a terrible traveler; you’d rather be home.
It was warm and familiar, like the child we won’t have
With eyes just as brown.
