XXI. Une lettre fleuve

XXI. Une lettre fleuve

Further up the lagoon, an octagon, a tower, before lancets of Poveglia—Left to their quaranta
Giornata; Insarov’s concealed tuberculosis was given three days by a solitary, who might have been a plague doctor—
Had Zoya then given up thinking in German; as for redoubling eastward to the legion toward Sevastopol
Had we not taken in, with my mother, in her box, the aria Tre giorni son che Nina (1749) by the Neapolitan Pergolesi
Succumbing to the same in Pozzuoli (1736)—In a second-rate room in Lido, after a porter made off with his purse—
After his face is covered, out of the stained linen a Rosetta star bead, worn of its seven layers, rattles

Onto the floorboards—Walking, in distraction, toward an unmanned pram to pocket an infant’s silver christening rattle,
Hailed by the vigilant eldest daughter—Becoming a French governess to a British family, in a manner, for a woman, no less than the Crusades, of the Swedish Quaranta’s
Ascent of the Neapolitan parliament; Shubin enlarged on all of the formerly cobbled ancestries—The matron set to reading Balzac’s The Purse (1832)
At tea, where the pert girl came around to asking after the silver glint conveying such tastes;  catching the patriarch inhaling from a hotel napkin steeped in chloroform, to the doctor’s
Family—For a reply; ignorant of Latin, and obstructed from being a Sister, came with morsels of Lamartine—Sa voix a-t-elle encore ce doux timbre d'argent? (1799)—This theater, with the sagacity of their much deferred holiday before sailing to Sevastopol,
Ended within sight of the wretched port of Balaclava (October 1854) two days choked within the moorings of merchant ships—Named for dwellers of the dragon’s lair, the Draghi della Pergola, residing in the Pesaro of Rossini (1792-1868), famiglia Pergolesi—

Florence Nightingale arrived at Scutari (4 November 1854)—Born in January; the San Gennaro procession from the solfatara, by the bishop’s effigy who had taken upon himself the plague (1656), perhaps annealed the Capuchins to Pergolesi
In his last year of life; rather than as they are recognized, by catacombs where friars’s skeletons rattled
Among robes the color of frothed coffee—Heeding accounts of the vermin-infested General and Barracks Hospitals of Sevastopol,
In the foreground of minarets of the Blue Dome; the ship was loaded with a box camera, patriotic gentlewomen separating their men from ruinous mistresses; each existing in their own quarantines—
Descending the gangplank; briskly, with a purse
Of modest earnings, with the gift of a mother-of-pearl dressing case, the shammed Russian shadowed vivandières in breeches to a canteen known as Spring Hill—Taking the hospitality from Mary Seacole, a Jamaican proprietress hydrating the wounded in hammocks, while engaging a crate of citrus for the grenadier’s bleeding gums; given the chronic shortage of doctors—

Turning to Alexis Soyer, who pontificated on the use of festering buttons; torn off of a doublet, doubtlessly, with the teeth, identifying each soldier’s fly-borne rations; the lamentable tinned diets, contributing to the cholera and food poisoning cases overburdening the doctors
Far from the genteel convent Miss Nightingale conceived in London; her post was set apart from the front lines of Balaclava, for the apparent regimen of white aprons and scorching carbolic—At the crossroads her station keeping; the first line of a suppressed hymn after Pergolesi’s
Arrangement (1736), Mary attended extremities in this temperate Black Sea climate, as chef cuisinier Soyer, on her own proceeds—Transported with a handle of a bucket or purse,
Soyer’s drum and furnace heated with minimal fuel, which doubled as a space heater, until Lindqvist’s pressurized paraffin Primus stove (1892)—Before the rattling
Wine merchant’s wagon was packed with 700 glass slides (1855), Roger Fenton photographed acquisitions from the British Museum (1853-1858) from the roof, which affected the setting of the plateaus of Sevastopol—
Though it is unrecorded, Fenton; rather, his servant, Sparling, numbered the patrons afflicted with cholera seeking Mrs. Seacole’s remedies in the quarantinable

Foci of the campaign, from Redan, Malakoff, and Mamelon, the improvised trenches, with migration of quarantinable
Cannon in the two frames of the Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)—Attesting to the lives Elena Stahov may have never lived, had she not expanded Mrs. Seacole’s French market in a boardinghouse abjected of doctors—
She, who had, at last, joined a contingent of Russians for Paris early March (1856), only with a sense for a surviving horse of the heavy calvary and light horsemen; what of Russian exports at Sevastopol—
Discussion of releasing the serfs of their twenty-year military obligation, and the land, to bolster gross domestic product; as for the Eastern Question that spans half of Pergolesi’s
Six-year career, but exhausts the composer's misattributed catalog—Whereas, you had dropped your purse  
Occupied where I am, at a bookseller’s; contemplating a registered kiosque in the planned boulevard, when the late December wind rattled

The signboard—Concorrenza, the driving hunger that rubbed out a past of feigning currency in Prussia, before photographing monuments, and I followed you home, to the Château de la Faloise; later, you took pains to screen my face in your salted paper, beneath a parasol (1857)—We both attended the death rattle
Of your wife, though she accepted her successor (1858)—Lifting the onionskin pages, the plates; quarantined
From sales, where Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, still gives us pause—Leonardo da Vinci’s angel; in even oils expunging the painter’s hand, when he was twenty-one (1473)—Your purse
Was reconciled underneath my proposed meeting place, Les Chevaux de Marly, Champs Élysées; a subsequent héliogravure of yours, among the contents of the Louvre (1860)—Jacques Louis David had orchestrated (1749) the Coustous, on the anniversary of his commoner’s death in Brussels, 29 December 1825—You doctored
The panorama of the Saint-Trophîme cloister in ten plates (1861); citing them in periods of doubt, as the radical freedom of twenty-one Constructivists—Images as commerce surveyed by Malevich’s Black Square (1915); beheld as a secret between us, Paul Gustave Doré’s print of the history of Russia, the mists of antiquity, into a black square (1854), and before the Siege of Sevastopol—
Predating his other prescient pieces of the Inferno (1861), the Newgate Exercise Yard (1872), the Mariner (1876), and Paradise Lost (1883)—Emancipation occurred a month, or two; depending on the calendar, before April 1861, the news  of war by those reduced by debt to scraping for opposing landowner largesse or Christmas half-days from the coalfaces and mills—Pergolesi

Never projected masses for three-fifths of a man; trounced on medieval chevaux de frise that would be no match again against the gas, and their effects reckoned by an auscultative rattle, as Pergolesi’s
Lungs—To enumerate Tatlin’s egalitarian stove (1929), or the pyramid for the executive of his unbuilt tower of the Third International (1919-1920), there is an undermining cynicism—The reread Pogodin’s It is not light which is dangerous, but darkness (1854), for the means of avoiding that ship quarantine at Sevastopol—

Tragic experience, much more so, to recount, my love letter is so digressive—Paul-Ernest de Rattier’s Paris n'existe pas (Paris, 1857), and not the useless riots, but their imminence that comprises the Arcades (1927-1940), as I recall your purse I returned, to pay the doctor; nevertheless, we find our paradise in the staggered monumentality of the world—