A change in luminosity

Ten Years Apprenticeship in Fantasy*

by Lucie Brock-Broido

My Darling C,

There is something to be said for Nature after all, dusk pending, variable stars. I have had a change in luminosity.

All winter long, I've tried not to write to you. There is something too final to it I should think. First, news of America: the farmers are being winnowed out again. Now that I have cable television, I am in touch with the world. In the rain last night, rice went for twenty-five cents a pound in the midwest. Blacks lined the barnlike edges of their city, umbrellaed by eaves & politics & the fair price of near-proteins. I, myself, as you know, have been starving alternately for a decade. Everyone wants to know why & I tell them it's my way of holding the world back.

Also, on the evening news, I saw a six-legged steer. The father (his master) reports that Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder. He loves that thing. Everyone wants to know how many hearts it has. Only one.

In the more immediate vicinity of my house where - you should know, it is just on the verge of twilight - I have courted this darkness lying face down into my hands all afternoon, absolutely loathing the light, doing Gestalt fantasies (you're allowed, I hear, to feel healthy in erotic dreams of submission), waiting for an orange moon to bloom into the nightsky, waiting for absolute quiet, waiting to get vulnerable again.

Where I used to live, the fog slid off the great bourbon-colored mountain to roost around my house at dawn. It was as thick as a religious cough. Here, cats come down the corridors of the city streets like the selected survived. No one is rich anymore. The extended family makes its comeback in the clapboard houses where all porch-sitting has been suspended until spring.

There's a big to-do about lymphocytes and immunities, what with all of us living so close together, the quick, violent, unapproachable deaths of so many of us here. The body's weather allows each germ to enter musically: ethereal, fullblown. Of lymphocytes, I imagine they are one-celled stars in the big liquid chambers of the body underwater: glowing & attentive, lighting the way as they linger in that great invertebrate chain of hankering.

I know you get depressed when I get all lofty like this. I've been reading the Romantics since two o'clock. Even the poets married. I find comfort in this fact, though it besieges me with awe. Those of us who are susceptible to weather might be marred by the great heaving effort of the winter as it turns.

As I approach evening I wait for the sound of stars crackling. I have never heard this noise, not yet. I imagine it is never cool there in the long, bright, monolithic hour of each star. It tickles me, actually, that this light received expired long before I ever spoke. Like this letter, which, if passed from hand to hand, will reach you long after I am gone. This moment will continue for as long as you imagine/ Me. Until the star goes blank & quivers/ Until it becomes vividly cold/ Possessed by an old/ Gravity & falls.

In closing, let me remind you of the Siamese twins separated not long ago in Canada. They let the little one, the concave half, be girl. Without her, he will skip quicker, eat more heartily, raise up his own kind & I think he should be given that one good chance. What better reason to go on living than to repeat yourself autobiographically? She didn't have that chance you understand.

I know the storm has reached past your knees by now & the electricity falters & the mail has become erratic & you're living on your thoughtful supply of canned goods. Don't let your teeth & hair get weak, as certain vitamins & minerals are missed sorely in a bland diet of single-minded sustenance. Pray only that the heat inside lasts until this thing has passed. Stay up all night if you have to, to avoid bad dreaming. It can hurt you & I need you.
I am, as ever, yours.


*The title for "Ten Years Apprenticship in Fantasy" refers to John Keats's request to be given a decade in which to indulge himself, watching the world before writing it all down. The epigraph for the poem, taken from "Sleep and Poetry" is as follows: "O for ten years, that I may overwhelm/ Myself in Poesy; so I may do the deed/ That my own soul has to itself decreed."