Storm Glass Read Online Free

Browning’s mind, its muscles soft under the constant pressure of the ocean. Limp and drifting, the drowned man looked as supple as a mermaid, arms swaying in the current, hair and clothing tossed as if in a slow, slow wind.His body was losing colour, turning from pastel to opaque, the open eyes staring, pale, as if frozen by an image of the moon. Joints unlocked by moisture, limbs swung easy on their threads of tendon, the spine undulating and relaxed. The absolute grace of this death, that life caught there moving in the arms of the sea. Responding, always responding to the elements.
    Now the drowned poet began to move into a kind of Atlantis consisting of Browning’s dream architecture; the unobtainable and the unconstructed. In complete silence the young man swam through the rooms of the Palazzo Manzoni, slipping up and down the staircase, gliding down halls, in and out of fireplaces. He appeared briefly in mirrors. He drifted past balconies to the tower Browning had thought of building at Asolo. He wavered for a few minutes near its crenellated peak before moving in a slow spiral down along its edges to its base.
    Browning had just enough time to wish for the drama and the luxury of a death by water. Then his fading attention was caught by the rhythmic bump of a moored gondola against the terrace below. The boat was waiting, he knew, to take his body to the cemetery at San Michele when the afternoon had passed. Shelley had said somewhere that a gondola was a butterfly of which the coffin was a chrysalis.
    Suntreader
. Still beyond his grasp. The eagle on the ceiling lost in unfocused fog.
A moulted feather, an eagle feather, well I forget the rest
. The drowned man’s body separated into parts and moved slowly out of Browning’s mind. The old poet contented himself with the thought of one last journey by water. The coffin boat, the chrysalis. Across the Laguna Morta to San Michele. All that cool white marble in exchange for the shifting sands of Lerici.

J OHN’S C OTTAGE

     
     
     
    S ometimes what you are running away from and what you find when you stop running and arrive somewhere else are almost the same thing—variations on a ghostly theme. Then, a subsequent experience can become a positive print of a shadowy negative in the mind. Understand. There were originally two Johns; a dark silhouette followed by an idea. The latter added detail, colour to the outline of the former. And then there was only one.
    In the not too distant past each time I thought of the first John the flat human shape of Peter Pan’s shadow leapt over the window sill of my imagination. Something about the way that shadow was folded up and placed inside a square object that may very well have been a drawer or toy box but that sticks in my mind as a suitcase. Folded up and placed inside some kind of luggage. You see, John’s shadow was always in my luggage, and no matter how far I ran or where I ended up, that shadow ended up there too. Even if I was certain that I had left it at home.
    Home. That place where John’s shadow sometimes rang the phone but more often did not—the real John being busy in some office somewhere in another city. One stupid wire connecting our breathing, our tense silences; our bodies occupying rooms that were foreign to the other. Let me put it this way. I knew every detail of the rooms I lived in; the cracked paint around the windows, the stains on the carpets, that bit in the corner where the wallpaper was beginning to peel. I assume that John knew the peculiarities of his rooms as well. But neither of us knew anything about the other’s house—about the place where the other really lived. That was the nature of our relationship.
    I always liked the idea that Peter Pan slid across the window ledge and took over the air of Wendy’s room. I liked his curiosity; the way he examined object after object so that, by the time he reached the very surprised Wendy, who was sitting bolt upright in her bed, he