The Wood Wife by Terri Windling

Author:Terri Windling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Books

❋ Davis Cooper ❋

Redwater Road

Tucson, Arizona

Anaïs Nin Guiler

Acapulco, Mexico

August 2, 1949

Dear Anaïs,

I knew you of all people would understand that the line between dream and reality is a thin one, a fragile membrane easily ruptured by a poet, a painter, or a drunk’s clumsy hand. Yes, I am drunk. It doesn’t matter. The edges of the world are softer this way—for life has been sharp as a cactus spine since Anna fled back to the family bosom and refuses to see any of us again.

I am learning patience. It is only a matter of time before she returns. It is not possible, it is not conceivable that she will stay away for good. Anna loves these hills, this sky, this house. She’ll come back for the land if not for me.

In the meantime, I am gathering her paintings, or at least as many as I can reach. I know that this is important to her—I don’t know why, but I will honor her wish. She was buying back every canvas she could from the Rincon series painted in the last two years. Will you part with the one she gave to you, for Anna’s sake if not for mine? I can send you one of the earlier pieces instead—The Highwayman or The Star Blower, which I know you have always liked.

The one you own now, The Trickster, is a portrait of one of the creatures I told you about. Anna calls him Crow. I don’t trust him. They were often in the hills together in the days just before everything went wrong. You’ve asked me what these creatures are, and I must admit, I do not know. Spirits, phantastes, fairies, ghosts … no single word seems adequate. They are not supernatural beings, they are as natural as the land itself. I believe them to be an essence, a rhythm, a language, a color beyond the spectrum of our sight. They appear in the shapes we clothe them with—and at first I thought it was only Anna who had the power to do this, but now I’ve seen creatures from my own recent poems, flickering like moths in the mesquite groves. Perhaps it is art that gives them these shapes, or belief, or our own expectations. You once told me that art is a mirror, reflecting each new face that we wear. So are these creatures. Right now the faces that they show me are of my loneliness.

I am pathetically grateful for your words about the new poems I am writing. My agent hates them, the idiot. He says if I want to write fairy tales I should stick to children’s books. Pat at Scribner’s is telling anyone who’ll listen that I drink too much, I’ve lost my edge, I’ll never write another Exile Songs. He is right of course—but that doesn’t mean the poems I’m writing now are no good. Pat will publish them regardless of his doubts—the Pulitzer has earned me that at least, even if I still have a readership that can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

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