Published by Nutshell Magazine. View the digital issue here.
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Tentative as a debutante you were,
turbanned in men’s clothes,
digging up lettuces. Reduced to
standing in unnatural attitude
before a Georgian house, you spoke
of your faded dynasty, the chronology
of other waif-like beauties (all the
fluffy blones). And you, faintly headmistressy,
tapping to Cole Porter. In the afternoon
you wore lame and a hat tilted, just
so. You were sartorial, filmy, the blossoms
surrounding the house in acres of white,
an 18th century Chien Lung wallpaper
in the salon – a conciliatory gesture, I thought,
for that place, all the bones that were there.
