Issue #1 Winter 2002
After Marrying Rochester, Jane Eyre Writes to Her Modern Readers
by Alexandra van de Kamp
I sit at my window as Ferndean Manor spreads out before me. The glossy air of evening gleams dimly here. The trees form a density within the darkness—their branches reaching into the air towards places I could never name. And I write my words: each one striking the page softly, but with conviction, like this rain that falls continuously. The air is so fervent it bleeds greenness. Seeing for my master the first two years of our marriage, I talked this world into his—my words a rain touching him towards things. After months of describing the brooding arms of chairs, the rain plummeting into the bluish-gray of windowpanes—I picked up a pen to write a correspondence more permanent than letters to relatives or friends. I know I am small. My pale, delicate hands quick flames that dart in and out of the air around My dear Edward. But when we talk, our words knit and entwine—weaving an air thicker than this rain. I write to write of density, textures, the thick occurrences that bind us to this life. Each image we witness, within and without, is perfectly placed, yet forever flickers beyond our explaining. We echo dimly in the forests of this world—our hearts lost in the fervent darkness of blood, muscle, flesh and marrow. There are forests within and forests without. This pen, thin but persistent, parts the world's dim airs to show certain paths burning in a sure light. Sullen, murky flames does our experience give us to see our lives by. So, reader, let yourself be borne a little by my words. And when it rains, knit yourself into what is near. Let the soaked closeness of details enwrap you, keep you near your deepest worlds. The now is a wide, quivering shawl, a light yet frenzied rain falling from you. Each life is a wilderness—the trees close, the air braided with its own thoughts. The heart deciding and deciding—burning its way through a slow darkness.
©2002 Alexandra van de Kamp
Alexandra van de Kamp has been previously published in journals such as: Red Rock Review, Poetry Northwest, the Seattle Review, the Greensboro Review, The Mystic River Review, Branches, Talking River Review, Washington Square, Ekphrasis, The Brooklyn Review and Poems & Plays. She has poems forthcoming in Ekphrasis and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her manuscript of poems, The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century, won the 2001 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize and was published by Wind Magazine in June 2002. Her translations of the emerging Spanish poets, Ángela Pérez Ovejero and Marta López-Luaces, have been published in the Canadian magazine filling Station. She is a co-founding editor of Terra Incognita, a bilingual literary journal distributed in Spain and the United States. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, William Glenn, and teaches ESL at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY.