moth-wing valour

This is my [odd] response to Dr Hillman's hero challenge. Thank goodness I thought of something strange because I had been worried for a second.

Comment?, my two readers. I know who you are!






In the pale gathering of window-glass, spindly light-webs of here and there
form themselves between the hall’s three shadows:
a weary sea-chest, haggard amber lamp and tall thin
                          mannequin.
She, the shawled and locketed grey
                          Madam
Passes alone through the doorway,
her spry young dressmaker hands touched with
                          rain,
and so made to wear a spidery countenance.
Her white winter fingers alight, and clasp
a leaf, a trace, time’s hidden paper, on the sea-chest.
           The eye-lit She begins a rickety examination;
                   She sits her on the sea-chest, under the amber lamp.
The mute and waifish mannequin holds watch.

Ask the ink scrawled on the page. Tell the dusky riddling light.
A candle on the sea-chest burns now – the paper filled with faded ink
                          burns.
The sparking cadence flickers, starving –
            An ancient autumn leaf ends early in spring,
                  and her wise old dressmaker’s hands conceal in ash
                           the all-held walloping of stains and splotches.
That old clumsy clamorous catch now fades.
No young hands, prying, curious and blithe, can now catalogue
             the sanctity of paper on a sea-chest
                     under the amber light –
Forging a concealment, the dame resuscitates
                          knowledge
              with its own ignorance, and keeps
Sacred something lost. Ah –
Those mannequins
             will never read
                      any of the webby scroll, the tangled try
The future – mythical Posterity – will never know
the thing, the element, someone will have wanted
                          to forget
When the grey and white spindly
                          Madam
sets a straw-fire to that seceding Past,
and saves an offering for the spry scatter-Light.