“What happened to the omnicscient author?
“Gone interractive.”
-Jeanette Winterson, The Powert.book

As anyone who knows me knows, I’m a great fan of British novelist Jeanette Winterson. Well, she’s back!

She’s got a
new book! A new look on her ever-more-interractive website! And a new feature- a serial novel, a collaboration with Ali Smith, AM Homes and Jackie Kay, that will appear on Winterson’s site and on The Guardian Online.

Here’s the first chapter of 52.

I’ve been looking on Winterson’s site for further installments and was not aware that there were any until now. Here they are:
Episode 2.
Episode 3.
Episode 4.
Episode 5.
Episode 6.
Episode 7.
Episode 8.

There, now you’re all caught up!

I’m all caught up myself. Episodes 7 & 8 were a bit slow but the first six were fun. My favorites were 3 & 4– the band and that strange child. Imagine Alice in Wonderland if she was really a boy dressed as a girl and was being raised by his deceased mother’s lover who is entering into a marriage of convenience;

“”Whose side are you on?” the dwarf wants to know.

“Pardon?”

“Do you belong to the bride or the groom?”

“In the end I am all alone,” the boy laments. “My mother died and left me like a parting gift with her lady lover, but now that she is about to wed there is no place for me. I ask myself: can I stop this ceremony? I long believed she should wait and marry me; she should love me as she did my mother. For so long I have slept in her bed and all she now says is: ‘You won’t be this age forever’, but little does she know . . . The man she is marrying is desperate to remake me into the man he never was and will never be. And me, I am not so simple as that, to be spun and then spun round again. Tricky me.” The flower girl stops for a pee, lifting the front of his dress.

“You’re not a girl,” the wedding cake exclaims.

“Never claimed to be.”

The new episodes are in The Guardian each Sunday.

Here is Episode 9. This one is definitely JW. I loved this passage:

“I’d like to get married,” I said.

“You’re young, you should, it’s a good idea,” said Polly. “Love without commitment is love that takes no risks, and . . .”

“And?”

“What you risk reveals what you value.”

Yep, definitely JW.

And finally,Episode 10, and Episode 11.

Ths post about The Big Read caught my eye. Here’s the list:

Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte -
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (This book made me cry.)

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (The movie was good)

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read)
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (It’s sitting here waiting until I finish Sena’s The Four Spirits)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 OnThe Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (started it)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker (it saved my life, more than once)
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Hearrt of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (my favorite– I love Ophelia’s flowers):

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (but I’ve seen both movies)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (I saw the play in Stratford-Ontario, but haven’t read the book yet)

I asked Shumate in the interview what he was reading because as a writer I know the importance of reading to any creative endeavor. As I’m working on the piece I’m writing– a mixed genre piece– I have been doing a lot more reading these days. Reading not related to my studies (necessarily). So…what am I reading?

Alice Walker– Living by the Word and We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For- which was given to me as a Christmas gift by my ex-lover. I’m reading it now because Alice Walker is what you should read when you’re feeling jaded by life.

The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction– another gift from another ex-lover.

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.

And The Four Spirits by my teacher, Sena Jeter Naslund (my copy is signed by Sena).

A funny story about Sena: On the last night of class, she invited us to dinner at her house for a reading of a piece we wrote. She greeted me at the door with a glass of champagne. “Come in,” she said, beaming with that warmth and hospitality that’s unique to Southerners, “I’m so glad you’re here.” She told us the story of her house: It was built by the first poet laureate of Kentucky. When he fell on hard times, he moved into an apartment across the street from the house he built on St. James Court, so that he could look out every day and see the place that had been his home. Sena, herself one of Kentucky’s poet laureates, said to us, “I hope when I’m living in that apartment, y’all will come and visit me.”

Me, at Sena’s house (with Sena’s daughter, Flora):

And I’m being a good boy and studying my French.

Since I am doing so much reading, quite by accident, about the civil rights movement (both Walker and Sena), I think I may re-read Walker’s short story collection, The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart. And, perhaps, Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country. Though my deepest hope is to read Love in the Time of Cholera.

And what, dear readers, are you reading?

David Shumate is a Professor and Poet in Residence at Marian University in Indianapolis. His first book of prose-poems, published by University of Pittsburgh Press, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize in 2003. His current collection of prose-poetry is titled The Floating Bridge. Wrote Jim Harrison,

“I was deeply taken by David Shumate’s The Floating Bridge. There is none better working now at this very difficult genre, the prose-poem.”

Many people say they have never heard of “Prose-poetry.” What is it?

Prose poetry is a form of poetry that ignores the well-established convention of line breaks. Most people can tell a poem is a poem by its presentation on the page—vertical. A prose poem looks like a paragraph abandoned by its brethren, left to fend for itself.

I am drawn to this humble form, or non-form, as some would have it, because it forces a poet to rely perhaps more heavily on other poetic conventions in its exploration of a subject. It also does not force a particular kind of reading of the poem on a reader, which can give the reader a somewhat more open entrance into the poetic experience.

The prose poem as we know it today had its origins in nineteenth century France, but you can go back as far as early Chinese literature and find poets working in somewhat similar forms.

Your first book, High Water Mark, was the book that introduced me to prose-poetry and I always recommend it to people. Who are some poets or books you would recommend to new readers?

I am drawn to many American writers, especially Jim Harrison for his clean and frank verse, but I find myself quite taken with modern European writers and classical Chinese and Japanese writers also. Tomas Transtromer, the Swedish poet, is a fine writer who sometimes ventures into the prose poem. Ralf Jacobsen, the Norwegian poet, is also quite fine. Lorca, Jimenez, Machado among the Spaniards. And Herbert and Zagajewski among the Poles.

Do you write in other forms? What other forms do you write?

I spent about ten years working with fiction, and I still dabble in that now and then, especially when I have extended free time to write, but I keep returning to the prose poem, which at times turns into a kind of prose sonnet, about fourteen lines, give or take a half dozen, which often presents a situation, involves a twist or turn part way through, and comes sometimes to a kind of resolution or further complication at the end.

This last week I’ve also been working on a kind of collaborative “non-essay” with a fellow writer. I’ve have no idea where that will lead, but it’s intriguing.

And I’m messing around a bit with drama, though, in truth, I’m sure I have no real idea what I’m doing. But in writing, I’ve often found that to be a virtue.

Your new book is The Floating Bridge. My favorite section is “The Bible Belt.” Can you tell you tell us a little about it?

Well, I have lived a good portion of my life in the Bible Belt—Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana—so it seemed like familiar territory. And I’ve been influenced by a lot of those odd perceptions and prejudices, and its beauties as well. So in this section of the book I find myself wallowing around a bit in that stuff, fighting back at times, offering alternative visions as in “Halo” and “Drawing Jesus” and “Jesus’s IQ” among others.

Even as a reader, it is hard to pick a favorite poem. My favorite, I think, is “History of the Umbrella,” or “The Dreams of Children.” Which is your favorite?

After I’ve lived with a poem for so long, I tend to lose my objectivity. I have a difficult time seeing it fresh again. So I can’t really point to a favorite poem. I react to them all differently.

What inspires you to write?

I write quite regularly. Several hours a day, usually, but not consecutively. When I sit down to write I often don’t have an agenda; I don’t know where that writing time will transport me. I may have a title or a phrase or an image that intrigues me, and then I follow it. I’m usually surprised to find where I end up.

You are Poet in Residence at Marian University in Indianapolis. How has teaching informed your writing?

Teaching writing keeps writing center stage for me and helps me, through my students’ eyes, to see the craft in different ways. But most of my teaching is quite fundamental, freshman and sophomore classes, and this is sometimes good because I think spending too much time in the creative workshop environment can be counterproductive, and might sometimes extinguish the intuitive elements.

As poet-in-residence I have no real responsibilities, except, I suppose, to speak in iambic pentameter on Tuesdays and Thursdays and in rhyming couplets every other Friday.

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading a novel called Out Catching Horses by a Norwegian writer. It was popular a few years back. I just picked it up before a recent airplane trip. The novelists I’m most drawn to are Jim Harrison and Cormac McCarthy. I admire their clean prose, their honesty, and the timeless issues they deal with.

Famous last words (a.k.a. Shumatisms): What is your advice to poets and writers young and old?

Write frequently. Find the form that suits you. Play with images and words. Let them guide you into some glowing core where you never expected to arrive.

A new Pantoum. Needs work but here it is:
The Hanged Man from the flowering tree
Bella donna
Bittersweet
In a white room with no windows.

Bella donna
Ghost and dream
In a white room with no windows
The angels deal the death card

Ghost and dream
Gin and regret
The angels deal the death card
And shame the Devil himself

Gin and regret
Bittersweet
And shame the devil himself
The Hanged Man from the flowering tree.

Alice Walker was born the daughter of sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia in 1943. She is an author, activist and Womanist (a term she coined in her book of essays <i>In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens</i> as an alternative to the term “Feminist”) who has written eight novels, four collections of short stories, nine collections of poetry, and eleven collected works of non-fiction. In 1983, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel <i>The color Purple</i> which has been made into both a film and a musical. And in 1997 she won the O. Henry Award for her short story “Kindred Spirits.”

The Color Purple is arguably her finest work, if not simply her best known. It is the harrowing story of Celie Johnson and her struggles with the men who abuse and oppress her– beginning with a step father who rapes her then gives her away in marriage to the abusive Albert, or “Mr._______” Her life is saved, quite literally, by Albert’s lover, the free-spirited blues singer Shug Avery. The novel is peopled by a cast of deeply flawed but lovable characters who struggle, as Celie does, to overcome their oppressors, their history and their demons. While the book has been criticized for it’s negative depictions of African-American men, Walker pointed out in her essay, “In the Closet of the Soul,” from Living by the Word that,

“It is a mistake to think that Celie’s ‘meekness’ makes her a saint and Mister’s brutality makes him a Devil…They are, in fact, dreadfully ill, and they manifest their dis-ease according to their culturally derived sex roles…They proceed to grow, to change, to become whole…by becoming more like each other…Celie becomes more self-interested and aggressive; Albert becomes more thoughtful and considerate of others.”

Walker’s work is marked by an abiding love and faith in humanity and nature in the face of shared, universal adversity born largely of a lack of awareness both of self and others. In response to the AIDS epidemic, for example, Walker wrote in her essay, “All the Bearded Irises of Life: Confession of a Homospiritual,”

“So many cultures have died it is hard to contemplate the possible loss or dulling over of another one, or to accept the fact that once again those of us who can appreciate all the bearded irises of life will be visually, spiritually, and emotionally deprived.
How sad now never to see men holding hands, while everywhere one looks, they are holding guns.”

In the late 60’s Walker married civil lawyer Mel Leventhal, with whom she had a daughter, Rebeca Walker, herself now a writer and activist. Rebeca Walker has chronicled her childhood and her relationship with her parents in her book, Black, White and Jewish. Alice Walker has, in recent years, written and spoken openly about her evolving sexual identity. Though she remains private, for the most part, about her personal life, she wrote in The Guardian in December 2006 about her relationship with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman, saying,

“[the relationship] was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.”

Source:
Walker, Alice,

Living by the Word: Selected Writings– 1973-1987

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York: 1988

Djuna Barnes was a poet, playwright, and novelist and a key figure in both Modernism and GLBT literature. Her first poems were published in 1915, accompanied by her own illustrations. She moved with her mother to New York City after her family endured financial ruin and there she attended the Pratt Institute and became a member of the Provincetown Players– which was instrumental in the careers of Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O’Neill. In 1921 she was sent to Paris on assignment for McCall’s magazine where she immersed herself in the intellectual and literary life of the West Bank of Paris, associating with such notorious and famous figures as Gertrude Stein, Dolly Wilde and Natalie Barney. She lampooned this legendary salon of women in her first novel The Ladies Almanack, but it is her second novel, Nightwood for which Barnes herself became legend.

Jeanette Winterson, in her Preface to Nightwood, wrote that,

“…the work is an important milestone on any map of gay literature– even though, like all the best books, its power makes nonsense of any categorization of gender or sexuality…Nightwood has neither stereotypes nor caricatures; there is a truth to these damaged hearts that moves us beyond the negative. Humans suffer and, gay or straight, they break thenselves into pieces, blur themselves with drink and drugs…crucify themselves on their own longings, and let’s not forget, are crucified by a world that fears the stranger…And yet, there is a dignity in Nora’s love for Robin…We are left in no doubt that this love is worthy of greatness.”

On the surface, the plot is simple and nearly irrelevant given the sumptuous language and experimental structure of the novel. It is the story of Robin Vote and the people who love her even as she leaves each of them, disheveled and all but destroyed in her wake. The whole is illuminated by the Tiersian seer, Dr. Matthew O’conor, one of the strangest and most brilliant characters in all of literature. Robin marries the Baron Felix Volkbein and they have a son, but Robin cannot endure the confines of marriage and leaves her husband and child for America where she meets her lover, Nora Flood.

“To keep her (in Robin there was this tragic longing to be kept, knowing herself astray) Nora knew now that there was no way but death.”

Subsequently, Robin leaves Nora for another woman, the American, Jenny Petherbridge and the pair return to Paris.

“When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions…She was a ’squatter’ by instinct.”

Jenny and Robin depart for America and Nora, like Felix before her, turns to the good doctor–dressed in drag– for consolation.

“What will happen now, to me and to her?”
“Nothing…as always. We all go down in battle, but we all come home.”

“None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.”

“…what did she have? Only your faith in her– then you took that faith away! You should have kept it always, seeing that it was a myth…the trouble with you is you are not just a myth-maker, you are also a destroyer.”

“The uninhabited angel! That is what you have always been hunting!”

Nightwood is thought to be based on Barnes tempestuous relationship with the artist Thelma Wood whom she met and lived with in Paris in 1922. Published in 1936, the novel was met with acclaim but little financial success. Barnes wrote little journalism at the time, became increasingly ill and more dependant on alcohol and the financial support of Peggy Guggenheim. She eventually moved back to New York and remained reclusive for the rest of her life.

While Nightwood is a centerpiece of gay/lesbian literature, Barnes, who was openly bisexual, was ambivalent about her sexuality. “I am not a lesbian,” she declared late in life, “I only loved Thelma.” But like all great literature Nightwood defies categorization and transcends the boundaries of class and time. As Winterson wrote,

“Nightwood is itself…reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know…From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.”

This is one I wrote after reading David Shumate’s, High Water Mark

Criticism

I like the one about Fitzgerald. The one where you’re drinking with Fitzgerald and he’s so drunk he doesn’t even know where he is. I’ve been there. I’m there now. And the one about Hemingway. I listen as Gertrude rolls over in her grave. “This is the thanks I get?” “A bitch is a bitch is a bitch,” he wrote to her. What the hell. It’s only eternity, after all. And now I’m done and I put the book away and the cat to bed. One life down and eight to go.

In her essay, On Being Ill, published in 1930, Virginia Woolf complained about the inability of language to communicate an apt description of illness: “Let a sufferer describe a pain in the head to a doctor,” Woolf wrote, “and language runs dry.”

Not only is the language insufficient, but in trying to communicate, Woolf felt, one could only invoke derision:

“Suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenza, their aches and pains which…now cry aloud…for the divine relief of sympathy.”

Woolf believed that an entirely new language was needed to describe illness. “To look these things squarely in the face,” Woolf wrote, “would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.”

Susan Sontag was one of the most prominent American intellectuals. In 1976, she was diagnosed cancer, told she had a one in four chance to live five years. In 1978, she wrote Illness as Metaphor, condemning the use of tuberculosis [Sontag’s father died of TB in 1938] and cancer as metaphors to make victims believe they have brought suffering on themselves.

“Illness is fact, not fate.” she wrote.

In 1988, she extended her argument on illness as metaphor to include the AIDS epidemic.

In March 2003, she was diagnosed with leukemia, thought to be a consequence of chemotherapy.

Sontag died on December 28, 2004. She was 71.

In Poetics, Aristotle defines, “metaphor,” as, “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” Sontag describes the method by which illness becomes metaphor:

“First…the subjects of deepest dread…are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor; then, in the name of the disease…horror is imposed on others…said to be disease-like.”

The controling metaphor for cancer, AIDS and other diseases is that of warfare:
Cancer cells INVADE
Cancer cells COLONIZE
There is a FIGHT or CRUSADE against cancer
Cancer is a KILLER disease
The body’s DEFENSES are useless
Cancer patients are seen as VICTIMS of THEIR disease
In radiotherapy patients are BOMBARDED with TOXIC rays
Treatment aims to KILL or DESTROY cancer cells
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can LURK for many years; it is a viral ENEMY remaining inactive until TRIGGERED.
Some people with HIV or AIDS are viewed as INNOCENT VICTIMS while others are viewed as JUDGED or PUNISHED for their lifestyle.

Because cancer and AIDS are considered evil and invincible, patients are demoralized.
Because cancer and AIDS are “intractable…capricious…mysterious” and therefore “morally, if not literally, contagious” patients are shunned. No wonder that concealment of the diseases is common: Logically, a disease that is regarded as a synonym for evil and death would be something to hide. Likewise, cancer and AIDS patients lie or are lied to about their diagnosis because cancer and AIDS are viewed as obscene. Concealment leads to social stigmatization:

“the illness is the culprit…the patient is made culpable.”

Once the disease has been established, metaphorically, as evil, it can be given punitive and moralistic social meaning:
Cancer is a metaphor for rejection of the city or urban life
Cancer is a metaphor for rampant industrialization and capitalism gone awry.
AIDS is a communal punishment. With its history traced back to Africa, its current status as a disease of the urban poor in the United States, and

“the migration of the under-privileged” from village to city, from country to country thought to spread the disease, AIDS is viewed as apocalyptic; the dystopia of the global village.”

As Sontag concluded:

““We are not being invaded. The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy…About the metaphor, the military one, I would say, if I may paraphrase Lucretius: Give it back to the war-makers.”

Sontag was openly bisexual, commenting in the Guardian,

“Shall I tell you about getting older? When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don’t fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty,”

though she maintained several relationships with women, most notably the photographer, Annie Liebovitz who
chronicled Sontag’s final illness and their fifteen year relationship in a book titled, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005. Said Liebovitz:

“The moment I put this book together, I felt such a sense of strength and something from Susan, something Susan gave me from her death. And she is still giving me things. It’s funny because – although in the end she wanted her diaries published – Susan always said she felt that art really had to rise above the personal.”

Sources:
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill, Paris Press: 2002.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and It’s Metaphors, Picador: 2001.

A completely new poem I just wrote today. Based on the myth of Narcissus, it is narrated by the river in which he drowns.

“A mirror becomes a knife when it’s broken.
A stick becomes a flute when it’s loved.”
-Yoko Ono, “Grapefruit.”

He would come to me each morning. The sun would rise behind him casting his shadow before me. He would lean over me and smile down into my face, then touch me with the tips of his fingers. Each time I was reborn. My old self discarded like a pebble. My body was no longer my own. My vision no longer crystalline or pristine as it was before. His eyes were my anchor, his voice my compass. Through the forest, he called me back to him. Where? Where? Here. Here. When he would leave me, there were no levies strong enough to hold back my tears.

There have been others who have come and gone. Most return with the summer suns. I recognise their voices. Their laughter disturbs the monotony of my days. Still, I lye unmoved beside them. Their words are words in a bottle, dying inside their mirrored prison.

Then one day he returned, blood on his hands. I wept, myself, to see him cry. He opened his arms and leaned down to kiss me. And, like a good wife, I welcomed him home at last.

Part of the inspiration for this poem (the title, for example) comes from this song:

“I heard the river rising
rising up over my head.
Heard the river rising
This is what it said,
‘I don’t need the live ones
I just take care of the dead’ “