The Vanishing Point

Spring on Guard

Spring is our blackness, our rouge et noir.The flowers droop like revolution's flags,ragged, disturbed by dry wind, whipped to passion,like the flare of lost aristocratic love.We take our beauty sleep in fits and starts,crawling, as in a dream, backward toward fish life.After so many years what words are left?The sparrows bolt, a mob of Persian soldiers,and through the scattered night a black slug crawls,horned like a samurai helmet's thin brass moon.We stare like sphinxes at the vanishing point.Sometimes the dawn comes up, and sometimes not,old devil-worshiped ball of gas, at lastclearing the eastern rooftops in a glaze.

Lady Hester Stanhope

The sort of woman you sometimes see, I am told, in London drawing rooms,—cool—decisive in manner—unsparing of enemies.

—Alexander Kinglake

The Jamesian young man had cometo beard the English lioness in her den,a mansion carved into a dry mountain in Lebanon—

Lady Hester, rising sixty, besieged by feral cats,she who thought Byron a swollen adolescent.("That dangerous thing," he had joked, "a female wit.")

Shipwrecked off Rhodes, she wrapped herselflike a Turk and never looked back.Entered Palmyra, ruined Palmyra,

petals strewn across her path, heading a troopof swarthy Bedouin, moth-eaten camels,a bickering English doctor. Suffered

gossip, bubonic plague, the itch of madness.After a slight, demanded the headsof the mountain peasants, then had their wives

dragged to the slave markets of Tripoli.Said: "Here if I sit under a tree and talkto a camel driver at least I hear good sense."

It was a world where a woman could still cut a dash,but no longer in London. She outlived one worldand did not survive long enough for the next.