A Bronte Gothic: 
Performed recently at Ilkley Literature Festival and Kendall Poetry Festival 2018

The Veil and the Wheel: For Jane Eyre

My strength,
My resolve is beyond all bounds.
All Celtic curiosity
Bent
Concertinaed
Up in my chest
Crumpled
Stamped
Down
Hard
And almost absolutely.

How did I arise?
Where is the horizon I wished so ardently for?

Again it telescopes in and in
And lands up
On my doorstep
The compass is redirected
true pole
Magnetic North.

Revolves not around a distant ice-cap
But burning white hot
Around this man
This son of Adam
This mirage, this distorting heat haze.

Scintillating around his soul
Making him imperceptible, opaquely glimpsed.
Indistinct
As though through fog.

Do we ever truly see each other?

First passion is a myopia, 
a veil.
Wrought on a loom of steel, weaving a cloth of milk thistle
Not easily torn in the first heat of knowing.

The second is a shroud of my own making
A mythological cloak
Of Golden Fleece qualities.

Glistening, 
entrapping in its bewitching curls and spirals
A self-made maze 
of dazzling blinding gold.

I want to be lost
I seek blindness
Let me loose myself in this consuming Other.

The veil is torn
The gold tarnishes to alloy paint 
oh bitter gall of knowing.

The Shadow of the myth I created
The Golden Fleece I had robed my love in
Is a painted prop in a school production

And I forget my lines
In the horror I have led myself into
My mummery
My delusion.

My hand stitched narrative
Unpicked
Ripped and rent
In two
Before my eyes.


O necessary Eve
How many times in this act will I repeat my lines?
Re-enact the plot?

Ah what?
Do I not know myself by now?

This is not child’s play
This is deep water.
This is a circle of fire.

This is everything I know cut through.
Painless until the deep purple ebbs
To the surface and stains the furniture.

Inward drop.
The wheel turns
Deep in the black water cut of the pit.

And I know.
I feel.
I sense.
The malevolent depths.

The Stygian waters 
and the turning of the wheel.

How it feels 
to drop like a stone.

And be dragged
Profoundly, deeply under.
Suffocating, pressure, so fathomless and cold.
To the apex of the abyss.

But I never see it.
I’m gone.
Exited.
Out.



Image: Wikki Commons:The Bronte Parsonage Haworth Parsonage was built in 1778-9. On the 20th April 1820, Patrick Bronte, his wife Maria and their six children, moved to the Parsonage at Haworth. This was where Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Bronte, Agnes Grey by Anne and where Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=bronte+parsonagre&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go#/media/File:The_Bronte_Parsonage_-_geograph.org.uk_-_922570.jpg  (Accessed 11 October 2018).


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