The children in bed, she puts away her sewing things and her Singer, her stock of curtain material exhausted. Reclaims her desk: moves her typewriter into place, her manuscript. Sets aside the files of the poems she’s already assembled in her binder, stacking the rest on the desktop. Tugs the chain on her new desk lamp, describing an intimate circle of light against the black arctic night outside, the streetlight on the mews haloed in frost. There is no moon, or none that she can see. A memory of its aloof radiance hovers somewhere distant, beyond the scope of her windows. She sees without it.

The bodies of the Spartans lay in the pass at Thermopylae under the full moon, the light by which the Persians crossed into Greece. The oracle had warned: your city will lay in ruins, or your king dead. By the time the Medes were assembled along the cliffs of Mount Oeta, the Spartans knew they had been betrayed by one of their own. They waited, outnumbered, with their king at Thermopylae.

Under November’s full moon, apples carpeted her orchard floor. She could smell the fallen fruit from the windows of her study as she wrote the last of these poems: their overripe pungence, winey and bee-sweet; apples softening in the grass, becoming something altogether different. She smells them now—the apples; the bodies stacked brown on the kitchen table, raisined and glazed; the honey cakes spicy and cooled. The small, perfect bodies in their beds, their hair rubbed dry beneath her fingertips, skin pinked by the vigor of the terrycloth towels; their sweet, powdered aroma of innocence, dumb, oh please, to the losses of the world.

The oracle had told her: Get wine and food to give you strength and courage, and I will get the house ready. Haggard, insomnolent, she stands at the center of the complicated truth of herself. She fingers her manuscript, this half-inch stack of vellum, her property, complete but not finished. Her eyes skim the pages. What is the point of suffering but redemption?—that is the question she has posed, one of many that she could ask of her life, her poems the laurel leaf, not the prophecy. She knows what she has done. Alive within this clarity, this palliative flare, she prays to no one: Please let me have this for a while.

32. “Amnesiac”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“Amnesiac”

FEBRUARY 5, 1961

3 CHALCOT SQUARE

LONDON

How does one know when something’s done, when the cycle is complete—

There is a shadow of green over everything. The shades are drawn. It is safer here, hugging her pillow, washed green by her bedroom curtains, cushioned by the torpid roses vining the wallpaper. The lie of it all, in here, while outside flushes red.