William Goyen
A BRIDGE OF BREATH*
You've been buried in Charity for a number of years,
Follie our Follie, and I had almost forgotten you until a memory
of you suddenly shuddered cold round my heart-sooner or later we
all have to walk barefoot over the cinders of our flame-eaten illusions
-and called me back to the loft where your relics lie stored; and I
am here among them rummaging for some answer. It
is
hard to be
in the world and bone of your bone. Cry me out a name, which,
like a spangle cast out to me, I may carry out of
this
loft with me.
I come, bending low, into the loft in the haybarn. I had been
here once before with Aunty to rummage for a picture of her mother,
and when we found the picture it had one eye eaten out by some
animal and looked hideous and staring and tormented.
Then I went again and again, with a heavy feeling of sin. I
was looking for something
within myself
that might flower out in
this warm secret light, unfurl (I had in my mind the vermillion image
of a paper Hallowe'en serpent that would unroll, splendid and quiv–
ering, when blown into) like a paper flower dropped in a bowl of
water. I felt the excitement-the first I can remember-of discovery,
like the feeling I had when I crept into forbidden books. ("Eugenics"
was big and black and evil, hidden under the linens in the closet, and
there I first saw the picture of a woman with a window in her belly
through which I could see a little, wound baby, all in a sac entwined
by a mass of strings and cords.) I trembled in the loft.
Here in the loft, which
is
really your sepulchre, Folner, are many
things of silence and dignity; and it seems that in them lie all the
hope, all the future, in the riot of insects and rodents which are
feeding on this storage of antiques.
There
is
a spinning wheel which spiders have mocked with glit-
*
This is an excerpt from a novel in progress.
