Jonathan Galassi - Muse

Ida was looking into Paul’s eyes again, her chin quivering slightly, as if searching in him for something he was certain he didn’t have. Though she was frail, her posture remained impressively strong. He held her gaze as openly as he could, knowing that he was looking, probably for the only time in his life, into a face out of history.

“Well, I’ve certainly talked your ear off, haven’t I?” Ida laughed again, mirthlessly this time. “I guess it comes from not having anyone to share any of it with, anyone who could possibly understand. It makes one positively garrulous, loneliness.”

“It has been unforgettable,” Paul answered simply.

“Nonsense.”

Ida looked across the room through the gallery and out toward a group of winking lights moving slowly on the canal. Just as Paul was about to rise, she put her hand on his arm.

“There’s something else,” she said, addressing him with utter seriousness. “Something I’ve decided I want you to see. I think you can help me with it.” Ida paused. “It’s a very large problem for me, but you’ve shown such good judgment I’m convinced you’ll know what to do. No one has seen it. It will require all your wisdom, but I’m convinced you’ll be equal to it. Don’t ask questions; let’s just agree I’m going to trust you.”

Judgment? He’d hardly said anything all afternoon. But he answered, “Anything. I hope you know how much you and your work have meant to me — to all of us.”

“Never mind.” She patted his hand. “It will be delivered to your hotel tomorrow.”

“It?” he asked.

“Pazienza,” she answered. “No more questions today.”

It was totally dark now. As if on cue, the lady in gray, Adriana, appeared in the doorway. He rose.

“I don’t know how to thank you for this afternoon, Ms. Perkins … Ida.”

“Thank you very much for coming, Paul Dukach,” she answered, leading him to the vestibule. “And remember what I said.”

Remember? Every word she’d uttered was engraved in his consciousness — though he had no idea what in particular she was referring to.

She led him to the elevator, then took both his hands and kissed him lightly on the forehead — was she flirting, performing, or offering him a kind of benediction? Then she smiled again, unreadably, turning away as the narrow door closed.

The package was delivered to Paul’s hotel at eleven the next morning. It contained a sheaf of eighty-eight numbered pages of rough, ridged European-style onionskin held together by a blue metal clamp, on which a group of poems had been typed. The keys of the old typewriter were so dirty that the e ’s, a ’s, and o ’s were entirely black, but there were no corrections or erasures. In their own way, they were pristine.

Clipped to the cover was a memorandum neatly typed on heavy stationery engraved with the Moro di Schiuma crest:

Dorsoduro 434

Venezia

Tel: (041)5253975

12 ottobre 2010

To Whom It May Concern:

I am entrusting the manuscript of my final book, Mnemosyne, to Mr. Paul Dukach of New York City, to whom I hereby convey its copyright. This letter will direct him to arrange for its publication as he sees fit upon my death.

I further direct that all earnings from the sale of Mnemosyne be divided equally, like the rest of my literary and personal property, between the Children’s Aid Society and the library of Bryn Mawr College.

It was signed in a shaky but readily identifiable hand:

Ida Perkins

The letter bore the seal of a Venetian notary.

Paul sat at the small, uncomfortable desk in his room, with the only letter of Ida Perkins’s he had ever seen. The clicking of the radiator and the intermittent groan of the Giudecca foghorn were the only sounds.

He began to read.

MNEMOSYNE

Ida Perkins

Venice, 2010

M in memoriam

Ille mi par esse deo videtur.

Paul recognized the Latin epigraph as the first verse of Catullus’s imitation of Sappho’s most celebrated lyric, in which he (she, in the Greek original) likens the man sitting beside his (her) beloved to a god.

The manuscript was divided into two sections. He turned the page and read the first poem of the first part.

MNEMOSYNE REMEMBERS

Mnemosyne remembers. It’s her job.

The stationary heat,

the glare, the trance,

the listless

lob; then evening coming on:

coolth, cardigan

on ramrod shoulders,

sharp myopic stare

across the meadow

where the great man’s sheep

browse as in an underwater dream.

No stars: the tipsy

stumble down the hill

in utter darkness

then the age-old dance

hand held and no stitch dropped

but one word said.

Mnemosyne was there;

the only thing she does

is this: recall.

It’s what she does.

It’s who she is.

That’s all.

Paul read on. The poems, recognizably Ida’s in style, were piercing in their simplicity. This was Ida at her most purely lyrical, he thought, yet sharper and clearer than ever before — and sadder, more elegiac. The poems were stripped down to essential statements in a way that harked back to her early classically inspired work, though these — knowing, rueful, ironic, resigned — were patently not a young person’s poems. And Paul quickly saw that they comprised a narrative.

The Titaness Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, was speaking the poems, remembering. And it soon became clear that what she was remembering was a love affair. But this time, instead of being the longed-for object, the pursued, the responder or rejecter, as was inevitably the case with Ida, her persona here, Mnemosyne, was the initiator, the pursuer, the supplicant — struggling, often without hope, it seemed, for recognition and acceptance, desperate to be taken in by an elusive, reluctant, fugitive, disappointing other.

I WAITED

in the sunlight

by the water

waited in the breeze

to hear the rustle

in the parted

grass to see the towel

fall on the chair

the body sink

beside me and unfold

the silver voice

remind me I was there

I might have dozed

but I don’t think I did

I was so dazed

with waiting

I got lost

in time without you

time I have no way

of clawing back

stale time

that swivels counterclockwise

down the drain

time that crystallizes pain

time that isn’t

life or air

foul time that doesn’t

move but disappears

I waited

in the sun all afternoon

I waited

on the dock

till it was cold

And when I raised my head up

I was old

There were none of Ida’s familiar erotic counterparts here, no “burly assassins,” no importunate, gorgeous swains-in-waiting begging to be sidelined or shown who held the cards. In these new poems, it is Mnemosyne who pines, who struggles to be seen and answered, and often fails. At times, she seems to be fighting for her life:

I never understood

that insufferable

balderdash about

hopelessness

till now but oh now

I do now I know now

how cruel your cool

and simple

kindness is

Then, to his shock, Paul saw something else.

THE RAGE

your local raccoon

didn’t know what to

make of us vamping

disturbing the peace

disturbing his habitat

new in the dawn

flashing his tail

by the dam he was

hoping to scare us

but nothing

could scare us

nothing giardia