Carroll Centenary Poetry Exhibition

From WHITE STONE: THE ALICE POEMS by Stephanie Bolster

TWO DEATHS IN JANUARY, 1898

Those flowers you sent to Dodgson's funeral
took your place in the crowd. Beside his stone
a perfumed heap of lilies and gentleness
of babies' breath, your name on the white card
still a child's. You spared mourners
your real face: fallen, etched with lines.

At Father's service you wore black as required,
let tears roll serenely down your cheeks, let
Reginald's husbandly elbow hook around your own.
Condolences blurred to the letter o, hollow
disbelief, so sorry--and this on top of
the other.
You nodded at appropriate times.

For months your griefs brushed past each other,
draped and faceless as the men who left them.
On a wall inside the Deanery appeared a spreading
damp the servants covered with a chair
and wouldn't let you see. It seemed the profile of a man.

Then one morning, alone in your husband's unused
study, you found in a whiff of ink the word father

and your ears buzzed, stars spun you
into darkness. Your orphaned body rocked
as on a boat down a river one ancient, golden
afternoon, but no one to tell the stories, no one to row.

END

The book WHITE STONE: THE ALICE POEMS will be published by Véhicule Press in March 1998; their e-mail address is vpress@cam.org and their web site is www.cam.org/~vpress and a schedule of Stephanie Bolster's Reading tour.