XVIII. La lumière m'obscurcit

XVIII. La lumière m'obscurcit

“When the drummer boy was laid down, Potter started mumbling aloud from one of his books. I shall follow his example and read when I get old. He himself once said that I was half-way to being a scholar, seeing that the action of the camera goes some distance towards capturing the mystery of human conduct.” – Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie

Strewn by cannon in the shadowed valley—When suddenly the husband

Returns—I, myself, Potter and Myrtle made for an orchard of greying plums,

Which only bear new drupes when the old knots are pruned—That I learned

From a gardener in Anglesey collecting Annie, Beatrice, and the children—

Occupying the blue room of Mr. Hardy’s postmortem stain, then blanching Georgie—

A ruined scholar, Potter decried, mundus patet, the pit is open, that November,

According to Plutarch, for the first-fruits—Aptly, a map of the world November
1854 anticipated him at the Galata concert party—Those familiar with husbandry

Reckon livestock trampled the Pera fig field into a barren—Deported from George’s

Household—My daring fiction of the tiger rug flung Annie into a sideboard; by her aplomb,

She convened Myrtle as the mother—Stripping down among soldiers onlooking as children

I did my black powder number—His searing revisions, the leaping flame patterns, I learned

From experience are formed by unevenly flowed collodion—Ungovernable, as drifts of learned

Men, rapidly darken—In Liverpool, reconciled with what lay on the other side of November,

I placed my plates of exit wounds with the Royal College of Surgeons—Myrtle kept to the children—

Lying awake in George’s furrow, I read of Crookes in Photographic News—Was it to husband
Nature’s riches from expense, from life sunken in port, for his tour of the Bosphorus—George’s

Aptitude for medicine, although his deviation was evident, in photography, was unattested by plum,

Unpaid jobs, or young Mrs. Hardy’s third miscarriage affecting to speak of it—Plum-tinted,

Mr. Hardy’s livid face burned an inborn mark on my mouth, for which I desired—Unlearned

In the method of excising a port-wine stain—The remedy that I was kept on as George’s

Photography assistant; the magnesium flares so strongly at work in our lives—November’s

Soot and whitewashed magnitudes of Minié rounds—In my wheeled compartment, a dead husband,

Another Hardy, reigned in the first dream passage of Ince Woods—An aging child

Of the Revolution went further, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce—A child’s
History—Lord Raglan’s kismet, a befogged full moon, the valley of Inkerman, with plum-robed
Zouaves—Remote from the risk of interpreting a soldier’s war, in a borrowed costume of a husband,
Each descent into a dark room, my silver nitrate addresses an Age of Brass, an unlearned
Group—
Hesiod’s Silver youth lasts 100 years—Coating wounds or plates, there is ethereal George—
18th Brumaire, or thereabout, a Palatine pit vents—Exhales a second Bonaparte November,

December 1851—Christened a triumvir, I, too, mock Roman history—November 1854—

Potter wadded pages of his book into a stove—George and I appeared as two smiling children

On the cover of The Times—Overturned before, I carried a skewered grenadier with George’s

Body in the same wagon we conveyed his father, onto Anfield—At Varna, an orchard of plums
Doubled as a makeshift burial ground—Selling the cart, I came to the aid of Myrtle as her husband,
Potter, the father-the-law—At the Observatory, I handled positives of the Moon—Crookes, a learned

Man, cited Davy’s valet, Faraday, and I have since then learned silver albumen printing—November
1854 saw the first 6-inch wet plate lunar collodion—George would be satisfied blooming plums
Frame his home and children, as Beatrice’s husband dreams of a geological survey of the crater surface.