Jane - Maggie Nelson Soft Skull ShortLit

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spears.

      But soon the fog begins to roll in again, in fingers. For a while the sun illuminates it from the inside, makes it warm. Then slowly the sun moves to the outside, hangs on its edges.

      Soon a bakery appears that she has never seen before. There are places like that, places that exist only once, or with only one entrance. Perhaps she has seen this bakery before, in a dream, or in a book still vivid from childhood, the one where a fox bakes éclairs and paces behind the counter.

      There is no one else inside. The chairs and tables are strung together with black thread and wire, as if made by birds. She sits down and begins a letter to no one.

       FIGMENT

       FIGMENT

      When I tell my grandfather

      I am writing about Jane, he says,

       What will it be, a figment

       of your imagination?

      We are eating awful little pizzas

      and my mother is into

      the boxed wine. I don’t know

      what to say. I wish

      I could show him: between

      figling (a little fig)

      and figure lies

      figment, from fingere, meaning

      to form. As used in 1592:

       The excellencie, dilicatnes, and perfection of this figment cannot be suffi[ci]entlie expressed.

      But he doesn’t want to see.

      Besides, that meaning

      is obsolete. By 1639:

       It is a sin to lie, even in God’s cause, and to defend his justice

       with false tales and figments.

      And by 1875:

       We must not conceive that this logical figment

       ever had a real existence.

       FIGMENT

      I invent her, then, as a woman emerging from the sea. A tall man meets her on the black sand. You’ve come back, he says. Can barely see her in the sea-light. They make love there, and become horses. As night grows black they become weeds.

      She asks him quietly in the dark to tell her about the mother of everything and he did not know of whom she was speaking. She asked the volcano and the volcano belched great streams of wet ash. She lay her head down with fatigue and found her head on a pillow of ink. Upon waking she stretched her arms around the globe and found her fingers weren’t even close to touching.

       A PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION

      “‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?’ Death—was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.’”

      —Edgar Allan Poe

       (1966)

      Hah! Good luck.

      Too bad Franny’s mother

      wasn’t right—too bad

      I don’t just need

      a warm bowl of soup

      and a long sleep.

      It’s cold in here.

       TWO WRONGS

      They say elephants can recognize the bones of a dead loved one when they stumble upon them in the wild. They will stop and wander around the huge decaying bones, swinging their trunks, braying in despair.

      The voice-over on TV might say, The elephants know that these are the bones of Dolly. They are mourning the loss of Dolly. But Dolly is our name, not theirs.

      It feels different to mourn something without naming its name. A fetus, a snake you call Snake, a woman with no Social Security number and the commonest of names.

      She was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on February 23, 1946, and she died on March 20, 1969, sometime between midnight and two A.M.

      I was born four years later, almost to the day.

      Her grave has no epitaph, only a name.

      I found her in the wild; her name was Jane, plain Jane.

       THE FIRE

      According to family lore, there was a great bonfire in which all of Jane’s possessions perished. Her journals, her clothes, her scrapbooks, her books, her typewriter, her school papers, her love letters. Her parents supposedly set this fire a few days after she was killed, when they went to Ann Arbor to clear out her things. The way my mother remembers the story, they set the fire outside her room at the Law Quad.

      The Law Quad is a grassy, public area, traversed by several cement paths and surrounded by ivy-covered Gothic buildings, one of which is the main law library. Upon returning to the spot, my mother agrees that the idea of my grandparents, two very private people, setting a large bonfire there and feeding Jane’s belongings to the flames seems unlikely.

      But questions remain. Where was the story from, and where did the belongings go?

       SLIPPAGE

      One day rummaging through

      the “utility room,” I find

      a few loose pages of a journal

      I assume is my own: pages

      and pages of self-doubt;

      a relentlessly plaintive tone;

      and a wanting, a raw wanting

      not yet hidden in my

      poems. But I don’t have

      a beautiful, hard-leaning

      script, nor was I alive

      in 1966. The journal is

      Jane’s, from when she was

      twenty years old. After

      making sure no one’s at home,

      I sneak into my mother’s office

      and Xerox all of it, then carefully place

      the original back where it belongs.

       (1966)

      You know, for a world that demands direction, I certainly have none.

      Will I be a teacher? Will I go to France?

      Really I don’t know how smart I am—

      and that above all else keeps me working and working hard.

      I’m not sure I’ve a good mind.

      I’m not sure I reason well.

      I know I can be as confused as anybody else.

      I don’t know how I’ll do in advanced courses—

      I don’t know how I’ll do on the next econ hourly.

      I

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