Fantasia on a Poem by Mallarme* and a Short Story by Clara Stites
Introduce me in your story
It’s as a hero terrified
Lest his naked claw abrade
The least lawn-hem of your territory
“The wind blew through the house warm and salty all day,stirring the pale curtains in the guest room where I slept alone
that summer, the summer we graduated from college, the summer I followed her home. One windy day, she took me
sailing far out from the land in a little boat with two white sails. I imagined my drowned and bloated body spiraling down
through dark water. She was showing off, telling me with her skill that she was beyond my reach, but at the same time
wanting me to admire her, holding out to me the unattainable prize: herself.
‘I should marry you,’ I said, pretending I didn’t mean it and
knowing my words would please her.”
Assassinating glaciers, I
That summer—the real summer, in Monterey, walking up and down the dusty hill from my parents’ house, I imagined a hero
who never loved again, as I wanted not to. Instead—though I didn’t realize it was instead—he traveled, until he had seen
every country in the world but one. He would never go to that one, for fear life would, at last, reveal its poverty.
Or could it read, “attentive to glaciers”?
Because she has me say, “the insistent loneliness that I have
brought upon myself by attending more to words than people.”
Can’t contrive so naive a sin
That you could not at once restrain
From laughing out its victory
Because I want her, somehow, to say she loved me even then. I want her to love me now. And she won’t, of course. And yet…
(Naiveté—yes—may have been my great asset, when I did begin to have successes—rather many successes—in my forties.)
The Body of Fate, derived from a phase of renunciation, is “loss,” and works to make impossible “simplification by intensity.” The being selects some object of desire, some woman perhaps, and the Body of Fate snatches away the object. Then the intellect must substitute some new image of desire; and in the degree of its power and its attainment of unity, relate that which is lost, that which has snatched it away, to the new image of desire….
Say if I am not happy—
Because she does, after all, have me ask her to marry me, again,and this time for real. And the answer—though she’s too ill,by this point in the story, for it to be entirely intelligible—the answer appears to be yes.
Say if I am not happy—thunder
And rubies to the axletree,
To see in air split by such fire—
I’m in Monterey. I’m always in Monterey, perhaps, waiting for her letter, waiting to see if her typewriter ribbon will still have those undertones of pink, and lavender.
One windy day, she took me sailing
far out
Kingdoms flung wide as spars—
To see how purply dies the wheel,
The vespers of my triumph-cars.
*M’introduire dans ton histoire
C’est en héros effarouché
S’il a du talon nu touché
Quelque gazon du territoire
A des glaciers attentatoire
Je ne sais le naïf pèché
Que tu n’aurais pas empêché
De rire très haut sa victoire
Dis si je ne suis pas joyeux
Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux
De voir en l’air ce que feu troue
Avec des royaumes épars
Comme mourir pourpre la roue
Du seul vespéral de mes chars