Creative Writing

On the express train to Vienna she writes in her diary notes about Rome and Naples. Ink marks like parthenogenetic aphids, pages like blood smears of homing pigeons. She is alone, gray, reconciled, a Leda long after the swan's departure, Odysseus retired at Lotophagitis. Back home, in Maryland, the notebook will be interred in the archetypal drawer, among the yellowed love letters, among the infant hair curls, among the dried adult flowers, near the cushion where the castrated cat dreams while Mahler's forever forever forever chokes in the green wallpaper. It is her message to imagined little sons; it is her membership in the club of Swifts, Goethes, Rimbauds, Horatiuses and deathwatch beetles. It is her monument outlasting bronze, five-dimensional reality, the last engraving of primeval man on reindeer bone, the last drop of the fluid soul before evaporation.