KATHLEEN JONES

AN EMPHASIS OF WANT

(For Christina Rossetti)

There were no birthdays
in that narrow house
whose silence, curtained windows
and the senile mutterings of three old women
muffled the words
that crawled painfully from her pen.
Not surprising that she wrote of absence.
Two lovers and a sister dead,
Elizabeth Siddal's suicide,
Lucy Madox Brown's consumption,
Dante Gabriel thrust violently out of life
by laudanum and whisky -
and not one Pre-Raphaelite
at the funeral.

Not much like the beginning -
the dreaming virgin painted by her brother,
Hunt's radiant Christ,
Madox Brown and Swinburne at the door,
Millais and Morris and Burne Jones
bringing embroidered silks and tapestries.

Too shy to meet the Brownings
and the Poet Laureate
she stayed at home
creating goblins in the notebook
Ruskin disapproved of -
`. . . . so full of quaintness and offence . . .
no publisher would take them.'
Italian sensuality corseted in black,
a tongue tied by formality,

concealed her passionate poetry,
erotic fruit, burned letters,
the home for prostitutes in Highgate.

the worship of a sacrificial God
who wanted everything,
she lay, eaten by cancer, terrified
she had not sacrificed enough -
had kept back just one metaphor
too many, screamed
to watch hell's creatures
obscenely cavorting on her bed
and no one there but the maid
to stand between her
and the death she waited for.


© Kathleen Jones