The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

and put his head in his hands. In the wash, the coyote pounced suddenly, and then sprang backwards into the air. He held a small rodent in his mouth, which he devoured in one great gulp.

“Are you all right?”

“Ummm,” Fox said. “It’s just my head is reeling. You think you know someone, and then you turn around one day and everything you thought you knew is wrong. Or not wrong, exactly, but it’s all got this color on it, blue, instead of yellow or pink. And so it all looks completely different.”

“That’s how I felt driving up this mountain,” she said, commiserating. He raised his head and looked at her. “Well, I’ve studied Davis Cooper as an English, poet. Born and raised in the West Country. So when I read his poems, I see English woods, I see the moor, and hedgerows, and walls of stone. And then I drive up here,” she waved her hand at the dry land around them, “and I realize that these are the woods that he’s been talking about all along. These hills. This sky. Now I’m reading a whole different set of poems when I look at Cooper’s work.” She frowned and sighed heavily. “The other ones, the ones I thought I knew, were just in my head.”

“That bothers you, does it?” He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get it. What does it matter whose head those images came from? ‘Poetry is a conversation not a monologue,’ ” Fox quoted Cooper in a passable English accent. “A writer can only put the words on paper; the vision has to come from the reader, right? It’s language, not paint, not film. That’s the beauty of it to me. Why do your woods, or your Wood Wife, have to look precisely the same as Cooper’s?”

“Well, in terms of Miller’s work on Cooper—”

“We’re not talking literary critique here. We’re talking about poems, words on a page,” Fox said, tapping his knee, “and what those words turn into when they slip inside your brain.” He tapped his head. “It’s magic; and magic disappears if you try too hard to pin it down.”

“I can’t leave it at that,” Maggie said. “I want to know what Davis was seeing when he wrote those lines—not just what I see when I read them. I want to truly understand the poems.”

“Ah,” he said, stretching his long legs in front of him, “then you have to go to the land of poetry.”

“Goethe,” she said.

“That’s right. I told you my sisters and I grew up on a steady diet of Cooper’s poetry books. Christ, by the time I was ten I could recite Goethe and Wordsworth word for word, yet barely add or subtract. Look, Cooper’s land of poetry was a place in his head, all mixed up of England, France, Mexico, Arizona—it was all part of him, and all part of the poems. I don’t think he ever separated it: In this poem I’m talking about the English woods, in this poem I’m talking about the Rincons. It was like it was all one land for him. In a way he never left England. You’d think, listening to him sometimes, he could walk out his door and be there.”

“That’s what I can’t get my head around. That he could love that and he could love this and the two are so very different. The new poems, the fragments I’ve found so far, are even more confusing. Time and distance is all broken up, the past and the future all jumbled together.”

“Time is a spiral.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.” He smiled. “I’m just repeating something Cooper used to tell me.”

“ ‘Time is not a river; it flows in two directions,’ ” she recited, from one of the Wood Wife poems. Maggie frowned, trying to remember it. “ ‘Time is the land I wander in, through smoke, through sage. A land carved in stone…’ ” She squinted at the distant peaks. She couldn’t remember how the rest of it went. Then she looked at Fox closely. She said, “There was a critic, back in the fifties, who wrote an essay insisting that all of Cooper’s surrealistic metaphors were actually literal descriptions of the hallucinations of a drunk. You said you thought Cooper was crazy yourself. Did you ever think that … well, that the ‘land of poetry’ was a real place to him? That maybe what he was doing was writing about things he’d seen—or thought he’d seen?”

Fox let out a deep exhalation. He hesitated, and seemed to be weighing his words. Then he said, “That’s what they say about Anna, you know. That she believed what she painted was real.”

“Who is they? Who says that?”

He shook his head. “Maybe my mother told me that. Or Lillian. I don’t remember now. But Cooper was a bit like that as he got older. You have to remember, the man was an alcoholic; he could have been seeing little blue Martians and no one around here would have been surprised.”

“I’ve gotten drunken letters from Davis. And I’ll tell you, the bits of new poems I’m finding in his notes don’t read like the work of a drunk. I still don’t have the foggiest idea of why he wouldn’t tell anyone he was writing them. And the further I get into his paperwork, the more I don’t understand.”

Fox gave her a wry look. “Well, join the club. I’ve been trying to understand that old man for thirty-five years. And all I’ve done is to find out just how little about him I ever knew.” He stood up. “Look, you still want to meet my mother?”

“Yes, I do. Your sisters, too, if I could.”

“I’m going to my mother’s place today and I’ll ask her whether she’ll talk to you. I’ll be out of here in another hour—then you can make all the phone calls you want.”

As if on cue the phone rang again.

Maggie groaned. “That had better not be Nigel,” she said as she rose to answer it. She paused. “Thanks, Fox.