Canto VI - Torre

“I have wrought these words together out of a wryed existence,

The heart’s tally, telling off

The griefs I have undergone from girlhood upwards,

Old and new”

-         The Wife’s Complaint

When they cut and hollowed the tor

to brick-and-mortar God’s house,

the land did not expect its excavated limbs

to be offered to every convalescent

whoever coughed up a kingdom. This

was where they shipped Browning – broken

and disowned – hacking up heaven on the page

in blushing stanzas. The land was satisfied

with her verse – the dying know how to live –

the bolted body bestows a key to the heart

which loves in ways immeasurable by depth

or breadth or height. They sent her for the sea,

and it received her coldly, pruning its foam to spit

through the shutters, tickling her black-flamed

brain with salted digits. In turn, she taunted

the ocean’s melody in its sevenfold cadence

and the waters ground their mossy molars

and drew their steel and knocked a wrothful palm

against her brother’s keel. He was adrift in the deep,

trusting fate to timber, rudder and bow

when the sea mocked the love of a poet

and dragged the man in pearly chains

to bite his eyes and barnacle his brow.

Browning chose to hate the land

of waxing stone and dread the ocean’s breath –

yet the sea was victorious only in hewing

a more profound poet; eating her edges

and polishing her marrow – like a sculptor

pulling patterns from the rubble – now

she steels a brittle spine and places pen

and ink upon the page and brings forth

new oceans and the waters of the tor

issue no reply.

The sea chanced and waited until the Millers fled

the new world to till the sands of Torre, where

amidst the lint and melted rock

they fed a child with story –

there was a leisure to this life, a civility:

a silken middle-class weight which hung and swung

like a hoop on a chain, and the fingers

which clutched the petticoat and boater

made shadows on the wall and imagined a world of death

behind the smiles and perfume and dignity – a stench

which dilates unseen – yet still she recited her ABC’s

at the Princess Gardens and traded two-pence

for the chance to skate the pier and pirouette

atop the dying planks where below the lichen,

coned and spiraled mouths crushed salt-crystal tack

and knocked their tongues against the pillars – 

but what is the sea to a child? Just noise

and froth tickling on the sweetest day of Summer;

Christie was thirteen when she nearly drowned

in the Beacon’s maw. Yet the sea was thwarted

by an old Sea Horse smoking a pipe,

scratching his beard, committing miracles

and dooming forests to the page. Christie was only

ever outsold by God and Shakespeare; fine company

for a child who dreamed of music, yet the calligraphy

of ligaments evaded her careful hand and the universe urged

a love for the quieter composition. So she watched her fellow

watchmaker and became one herself, teasing cogs and chimes,

learning the orbit of the soul of man –

that infernal, needling

tick. Christie knew

the devil was balding –

that Satan wore perfume and dined at three –

and she took that knowledge

of daggered smiles and poisoned handshakes

and turned it into mystery. While cloistered

in sanitized rooms, dispensing powders,

serums, antidotes – the sea wondered

when her mind slipped

from the gentle snakes of Asclepius

to ponder the boomslang’s venom –

when the hand which gave

contemplated the weight and purpose

of the hand that took. After all,

amidst this linted landscape,

her mother carved a pastel paradise

and Christie chose to write bodies writhing

in the earth next to her childhood. Why

be afraid of anything but ignorance,

why worry about husbands clutching

their knives? When you can play with death

while you knit – each purl and cable

a disaster in imagined lives.

Christie understood

beneath her wiles and her wit

there was a golden maxim amidst the cruelty;

take what you want

and pay for it.

Back to top