The Last Gold of Decayed Stars by Colin Insole

Author:Colin Insole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mount Abraxas
Published: 2023-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Guttering

of the Lamps

In the boathouse, Francesca said, “The Keeper tells me it is chance and the river’s underground flow that wash my dancers to me. But there is meaning and order in the sifting of the bones. And I am sent fragments of poems by an unknown admirer. I scan the faces of the passing crowds, hoping to see him, but he is wary and secretive. He has seen my art for he writes of the sighs of lovers, whispering in the branches and the entwining of their frail arms. He tells me my body is ‘a hyacinth’ and our silence ‘a black cave’. He speaks often of colour and the dark sadness of birds and small creatures—he knows of my favourite for he wrote ‘The Song of the Captive Blackbird’ for me. And he knows the ways of this town for he writes of its decaying and crumbling stars.”

And she handed Anna a keepsake book in which she had pasted the muddied scraps of postcards, letters and manuscripts. Buried in cellars for decades and carried by the river’s surge, isolated phrases were barely legible. But the power and intensity of their words shone like stars. Daily, the book was embellished with a fresh garland of hedgerow flowers or winter foliage. Her chains of tangled daisies, dandelions and grasses, withered and faded, even as she tied and wove. Their stains and juices impregnated the pages, clouding the remaining words of the verse; an accumulation of dried leaves, petals, dust and running ink.

∗ ∗ ∗

The few discernible images Anna had seen in the mud-spattered scraps of paper that comprised Francesca’s collection of love poetry, triggered a memory from her grandmother’s reflections on the Countess, whose powers and influence extended far beyond those of a rich and generous socialite. Climbing the stairs to the surface, she sat, under the shade of a willow tree and read:

‘Engrossed in our revelries and in each other’s arms, I do not feel that we understood the lineage of the Countess. But in the grey years that followed, I have sometimes seen her face in the friezes and vases from Ancient Greece or her eyes in the work of goldsmiths from Byzantium. Millenia ago, her dynasty gazed on the waters of the Bosphorus or the Aegean Sea, and I picture her crest, a golden head, surrounded by birds in flight, on the prow of those ships, as they sailed to the outposts of Europe, bringing their culture and civilisation. She was the last of her line and my own photographs of the lost, are but footnotes in comparison with her ancestry. She has watched the rise and fall of towers, cities and empires and her eyes held the memory of Europe ingrained, like the bones of the mountains or the imprint of forest in tree ring and leaf mould.

I learned a little of her work when we were alone together in her library, discussing the lost soldier.

Every autumn, at the velvet hour, when the bells rang

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