Drapery Study

It is unjust to dispel smoke,To quarter it with the hand or to impale it on a skewer of breath.The lightest mist has organs and glandsAnd circuits that connect its parts.The clouds are cautious in their transits throughThe stony thornbush of the mountain peaks,And contort themselves most commonlyInto grand arches of their venous flesh,Over highways and at the rim of the world,Like bridges of sand in the air,Fraying only where their membranes touch the ground.I came abstractedly, like a barreling fog,Into your neighborhood tonight—not to look for you,But without cause. The trees that line the avenue where we would walkPummeled and abraded me, as though I'd fallen from a height into their arms;And your laughing body, far off, accompanied by new friends,Crosscut my limbs like a projectile and clipped the nets of my integrity:The electrodes and intravenous ports that secured your lines ripped out.They were impacts like these, they say, that scored the visage of the moon,And tore our faces and the chambers of the heart,So that blood first came to irrigate the limbs accidentally—And shocks like these that keep the sober clouds at their remove.

MARY HENRIETTA KINGSLEY (1862–1900), born in London, was a Victorian traveler best known for her remarkable reports from Africa. Her father was a physician who accompanied well-to-do families on their world travels, her mother his former housekeeper; the parents had married only a few days before Mary's birth. Though her younger brother was sent off to study law at Cambridge, she herself was largely self-educated, reading widely in natural history and accounts of exploration, and learning German to assist in her father's research as an amateur anthropologist. The family moved to Kent in 1879 and to Cambridge seven years later. Not long after Mary Kingsley returned from a brief trip to Paris in 1888, her mother's health, always fragile, declined dramatically, ultimately leading to aphasia and paralysis; for the next four years Mary provided daily care, and when in 1891 her father came back from one of his voyages suffering from rheumatic fever, her nursing duties intensified further. In 1892, her parents died within three months of one another, and her brother quit England for the Far East. Left alone and free, she traveled to the Canary Islands, and one year later, after drawing up her will, set out for West Africa; she was almost thirty. This first journey took her from Liverpool to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in August and back to Liverpool in December. On the basis of her experiences and the scientific specimens she managed to collect, she was able to secure a contract from Macmillan for a book on West Africa, and the following December (1894) she set off once again. As an explorer she proved to be fearless, leading canoe expeditions, negotiating rapids, and successfully reaching the summit of 14,000-foot Mount Cameroon. Beginning with almost no knowledge of African languages, she ventured alone into regions inhabited principally by cannibal tribes, and her recognizably English mode of dress remained unchanged: high collars, long black skirts with petticoats, a small fur cap, and an umbrella.

When she came back to England at the end of 1895, the press celebrated her as a courageous example of the "New Woman," but she responded to this designation dismissively. In a letter to her publisher, she once observed, "I am convinced that I have somehow strayed out of the eighteenth century into modern life. My style and that of the early navigators is one and the same." Mary Kingsley's first book, Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons, was published in January 1897 and had gone through five editions by June. Her second book, West African Studies, which offered a political and economic vision for the future of the region, appeared in February 1899. Around that time, when she was thirty-seven, she met Matthew Nathan, a man who became Governor of Sierra Leone, and to whom she was very much drawn...