A Little White Shadow.

I loved this work of Erasure Poetry, by Mary Ruefle.

"An exquisite art book of gentle and elegant found poetry.

Selectively painting over much of a forgotten nineteenth-century book, Ruefle's ninth publication brings new meaning to an old story. What remains visible is delicate poetry: artfully rendered, haunted by its former self, yet completely new." - wave books

But you've got to see it, this does no justice!

One in Ruins, struck notes whose sounds spent a winter here

The number blue encircled herself

autumn had no particular talents but genuius.

He quickly spoke fluently in many languages,

a human humming bird

the island drifted into Dante

the shadows growing longer and more purple

Seven centuries of sobbing

gathered in the twilight

and had their pages wandered, through

the dead.

borrow so little from the past

as if they were alive,

It was my duty to keep the piano filled with roses.

We really did like Bohemia
and the little winds blowing
on rainy days,
and art was and would always be
and her hair, well it might grow
white in time
would always come for me
and grow confidential
then curve her shoulders and
say something philosophic.
that evaporated
like the rivers in a Chinese picture

other people read sonnets
but
my cousin Suvia
never cared for blood
and in this as in most things I agreed with her.

I had been sketching
tall pink
heather,
her hat being the only thing moving
I was brought in contact with the phenomenon peculiar to
" A shadow."
Everyone you met was sure, sooner or later, to speak
the
time-

No one at the Villa
made me secretly think of children chasing butterflies.

the flapping white
dresses of the fish
rising sharply against the sky
at last standing breathless before
two donkeys
stopped and spoke with them.

the servant seemed to be a
lady in quaint de Medici costume,
resting on soft red cushions, partially
covered with hands

my ignorance
was a refining influence

the view from the window stopped
and said, " Here I lie day after day and
and the only things I possess
which can travel, can go no farther,

think me lazy
always idle; but my brain
grows weary just thinking how to make
thought,

very simply,
" It's always noon with me.
pale, and deformed but very interesting,


sorrows of
a little Quietist

it was she was not known beyond her own chair

I think what will always linger
longest in our memories of her

we never would any of us miss

suffering
would lay back on her pillows exhausted with the intensity of
hope

a heart a heart when
laden hearts
cause they

showed me a little book

saints
disagreed with her.

artists
and their quarrels

a barbarity worthy of the Goths themselves.

flowers and birds
not able
to say something practical about human companionship

the pen
was going to try and join us there later,
provided the fever did not break out

the last three years had taken no vacation,
and the world
seemed drowsy

on the German piano.
birds were singing
in the language
which some believe he wrote after he drew the portrait of her
in black velvet
the last one
he wrote when quite an old man

Rendered into English
this was something of its meaning:

paper
on
fire

They had been at a loss for a subject at first, but had finally chosen
looking down the road as if waiting for
a new volume of Browning

I could not bear to say good bye. never
seemed to have held anything so hard be-
fore.

went away without word
for fear of breaking
Yet in the hall I turned

Our Lady of shadowy boats

three weeks later
brought us news of
September
married very quietly to
Rome
on her way back to Russia.


the stern sad problems of human
existence.
had its pauses

having once caught
sight of
a letter
God
changed.

the " Little White Shadow"

END
on end