1813

After Thomas Love Peacock's Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Miles still to Bracknell, as the woman shifted

Three parcels across her mountainous lap,

And in that instant, accordion of skirts lifted,

Petticoats above the knees, Shelley watched

Her calves collapse, molten flesh like a poultice

Leaking through sackcloth, tubers gone to rot,

The carriage air fetid and contagious.

He swaddled his head with scarves, a filter

Created too late; abruptly weak, flushed,

Her affliction had routed through his veins.

Who insisted that travel was a tonic?

Upon arrival at the inn, his intricate skein

Of symptoms unwound and unwound-an itch

Beneath his chin, nematodes burrowing deep

Within the lymph glands, an aching right wrist

Sure prelude to that arm's unbridled girth.

Soon he dreamt of dead elephants floating

In lakes, then woke feverish, the nightshirt's

Wrinkles stamped onto his chest. Mirror-bound,

He monitored each ruddy crease until it faded,

His neck became porcelain again, and a barren

Day seemed utterly impossible. How to recapture

Those dusks with Iathe, pacing, his daughter

Close at his breast, no fear of lesions or fissures,

Singing Yähmani into her vanilla hair,

His three syllables of secret journey

Chanted to invoke a child's solid sleep,

And dreams of the distances between cities.

And if the ulcers erupted, seeping purple,

Who would whisper, and lull her, and sing?

Certain nights even the trees were instigators,

And the wind. Branch shadows, dark hairs

Stirring on knuckles, blotches on his hands-

Weather and illusion would turn to portent

As the poet, comparing his wrinkles and limbs

With companions, contorted the evening party

To hours of prods and pinches. Show your thumb!

How thick is your ankle? Are we the same?

Flex your elbow! His guests always obliged

Though this warm evidence never calmed him;

Their perfect correspondences, foot against foot,

Thigh to thigh, were not enough. Only Peacock

Could quell his friend's panic, retrieving books,

Quoting Lucretius through open parlor windows:

"Est elephas morbus, qui propter flumina Nili,"

Listen, only in Egypt, "gignitur Aegypto . . ."

That woman in the carriage was fat, nothing more.

A balm of rationales spoken aloud each night,

Until one dawn his body returned, proportioned,

Flesh taut and pores invisible. The sweet skin

Beside Iathe's left earlobe, Yahmani, her scent

Was what he'd missed the most, the whole inn

Still asleep and her cradle brimming with sun.

Outside the landscape was hedgerows and rills.

No pyramids or sphinxes squatted on the horizon.