Monk’s House, Rodmell

—for Lynne McMahon In her bedroom, she set a convex mirror on a stand, so that when the visitor looked in expecting to see the familiar line of lip and brow, what appeared instead was the head up-ended— the mouth a talking wound— above the eyes, upside down, fluttering, like the eyes in the skull of a calf slung on the blood-hook— or a baby's lightning blink, dropped low in the bone cage about to be born Walls washed down with the cold pardons of the nurse. Gem green paint restored from old scrapings. Here and there, a trifling, a lightening beyond the author's original intent, which was in the drawing room, positively spleenish. From razor bits of palette, touch-ups: Mrs. Woolf's favorite color. The Trust ladies place the still-ticking brain of Leonard's wireless next to the empty brass stalk with its single blossom: old black hat she wore like pharaoh gazing down the Nile-green Nile. That's her: the flat drainboard of a face set so fiercely against the previous owner's trompe 1'oeil beard and jug. The simpleton's request: a picture of her young— So the trees walk up burning, the birds speak Latin for the dull-witted, drenched palette the glimpse of whirlwind in the pond where their handfuls of ash drifted down and over the great mown meadow next door where the Rodmell August Fair is on. My daughter astride a steam engine, bored as any child with the past. Later makes an X (her favorite letter) with two sticks held up to the window of the great writer's garden study. But the mirror standing in the air a glass knot tying and retying itself would repolarize, and she, drawing near, reverse herself. A woman's rapt beautiful face drawn downward by gravity, sorrow, lit upward by the flame of age— could turn over, floating, then submerge, amniotic! Across the green from the bedroom window she saw it: a fin cleaving dark waters— "and that became The Waves." The ladies sip and look. Vanessa, pregnant, laughing, crosses the garden. Two women walk among the hollyhocks with shears. The hedge dented by one's fluttering hands. Inside her sister's body: fluttering hands. Annie's white sweater catches on the thorns of blackberry canes. I pull her free then pick six little ones, busy, like the swarm cells of a fetus. Or the enlarging failure in those rooms, unchecked growth: death-drawn, claustrophobic. The wind, up from the South Downs, blew the two women across the garden, their shadows like crossed sticks. Sisters. One shrugging slightly, a loose mauve shawl. Where her sculpted head sits now, a stone wall. She sat at this table eating mutton and bread. He was talking about the socialist initiative and she turned away: someone was knocking at the window. It was the French photographer we surprised on our way out, shooting the forbidden interior through the dark glass.