23. Poetry and a Fire
23
POETRY AND A FIRE
A roar of fire
has split my heart
without him I die.
— LíADAN, “LíADAN TELLS OF HER LOVE FOR CUIRITHIR”
B y the time we had come back down the mountain, I was giddy like a child, tripping on Jonathan’s heels and begging for more beautiful glimpses of his Sight. It felt strange to think of it as such, a term so close to a seer’s identity, but I also couldn’t think of any other way to say it. In a way, my Sight seemed woefully misnamed—he actually used his eyes for his, while I used my mind and touch, and really all my senses.
“Last time, I promise,” I wheedled. “Something small. You don’t have to look at everything again. Just a tree, or a branch even. A clod of dirt.”
Very few times in my life had I experienced the kind of moments that made the world tilt on its axis. The first was when I learned I was a seer, that my mother and Grandmother were also seers, and that my father was definitely not. I was five.
The second was, of course, when my father died.
The third was when I read W.B. Yeats for the first time as a nineteen-year-old college sophomore and a recitation of “The Stolen Child” plucked the strings of my watery soul.
The fourth and only other was the first time I’d touched a manuscript in the Burns Library and watched the poet I revered come to life and tell me secrets no one else knew.
That was nearly six years ago. I had almost forgotten what it was like, this sudden euphoria. How it filled the soul and banished everything else.
Jonathan chuckled and stopped in front of the enormous stump of an old-growth cedar. For the fifth time, he held out his hand.
“Just for a moment,” he said as I whipped off my glove and took it.
Was it me, or was he enjoying these excuses to touch just as much as I was? A thrill of pleasure ran up my arm even through the blankness in his thoughts. He was shielding again—not as skillfully as a seer (with Penny, I wouldn’t have even known), but somehow he was managing it. I still didn’t know how.
Then he turned to look at a boulder jutting out of the ground a few feet off the trail, trimmed with ferns and lichen, and I stopped worrying about his thoughts as I Saw the world through his eyes instead. Instead of the mossy gray that it had been two seconds ago, the boulder was now a shimmering kaleidoscope of every color, with a steel undertone identifying it as the rock it was. Solid but still moving, albeit much, much more slowly than the frenetic activity flowing through the plants.
I enjoyed the show until Jonathan’s fatigue flowed through my fingertips. The lights twinkled, then began to fade. He dropped my hand, and the lights vanished.
I turned. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep asking. It’s harder now than the first few times, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s not something I do just to look around. I generally only take enough time I need to deliver a spell, and then I stop. Sometimes I forget how pretty it actually is, so thank you for reminding me.” Jonathan smiled almost shyly.
I felt my cheeks heat in return. “Anytime you need more reminding, just let me know.” I held out my hand again in jest.
He looked but didn’t take it. His smile disappeared, but before I could ask why, he stepped around my reach and continued down the trail. “It’s going to rain soon,” he called over his shoulder. “We’d better get down the mountain.”
I looked up to find thick clouds drooping across the mountain’s peak and fog swirling through the trees. A fat raindrop landed on the tip of my nose, and I closed my eyes at the sudden pierce of clarity it provided. I for one never minded being caught in the rain.
“Sure,” I said reluctantly. “If you insist.”
By the time we reached the parking lot, we were completely soaked through. Shivering in the parking lot, I suggested returning to the house to warm up by the fire. Jonathan was quick to accept.
“So, why Irish Studies, then?” he asked once we were both comfortably settled in the living room.
Perhaps it was the effect of the rain flowing down my body for the last hour, or perhaps it was simply Jonathan’s presence, but the house was completely quiet without the feeling of holding anything back. A fire of juniper and dried cedar flickered merrily while we lounged with cups of tea on the soft sheepskin rugs arranged in front of the hearth. Our raincoats were hanging on the porch, and I had lent him a pair of my dad’s old sweatpants while we waited for his clothes in the dryer. For the first time since I’d met the man, he looked as disheveled and unkempt as I usually felt. He kept pulling at his clothes like they physically hurt. I was having a hard time ignoring how attractive he was.
I sat cross-legged, feet in Gran’s hand-knit socks, as I leaned against the edge of the sofa. My mug heated my palms as I considered his question.
“Why not?” I replied. “I am Irish, on both sides. Maybe I just wanted to learn about my heritage.”
Jonathan snorted. “Says the woman turning her back on said heritage. Don’t be coy. It doesn’t suit you.”
I huffed. “Fine. It’s…hard to explain, I suppose. Well, you’ve read some Yeats, I know.”
“Of course.”
I snorted. “‘Of course.’ My mistake.”
Jonathan frowned. “W.B. Yeats is basic reading in most liberal arts programs.”
“That depends on where you go.”
Jonathan just sipped on his own tea, black with lots of cream, and waited.
It’s not like I hadn’t answered this question dozens of times. Everyone who has ever done advanced research has to explain exactly why they want to answer some esoteric question that literally no one else in the world is trying to answer. Devoting six to eight years of your life studying one small corner of knowledge is hard to defend, but we all have to do it. So, I usually trotted out the same stock answer. Family heritage, learning my history, and so forth.
But Jonathan wasn’t buying it.
“Do you remember ‘The Stolen Child’?” I asked.
He nodded, then proceeded to recite the final quatrain of every stanza in the poem:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
I sat with that, letting the rhythms of the poem wash through me, the same as they had nearly a decade earlier. “It was for a class—some basic poetry seminar with no real theme. But when I read it out loud in my dorm room, I cried like a baby. It was the first time anyone had ever written anything that sounded like…well, like what I felt like all the time.”
“Like a child taken by fairies?”
“Like a fae who had their childhood stolen by magic,” I corrected him. “A seer who found ways to reclaim it in the ‘waters and the wild.’”
I could see the photocopied reader in my mind’s eye, then the well-worn copy of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems I had found at a local bookshop. I’d replaced that collection four times in the last ten years.
“I see why you identify with it. The water and all.”
I nodded. “I started to devour Yeats. I read everything he wrote, and then I started to learn more about him. I suspected he was a seer when I started, but I didn’t know it—not really—until I touched one of his early handwritten manuscripts. I Saw his thoughts, Saw the memories he searched for and tried to record. Saw his search for his history. And I Saw myself in that history too. This girl, so lost in the world most of the time. I found a way to root myself in something, and I wanted more.”
“And did you?”
I thought about that for a long moment. There was more to it than that, I decided.
“Yeats wrote a lot about water,” I said. “And, of course, the Greeks. So much so that my advisor recommended I take a few seminars in the Classics department just to understand him better. I liked Heraclitus the best. I used to write some of the Fragments on Post-Its and put them around my dorm room.” I chuckled. “Reina hated them.”
“‘You cannot step twice into the same rivers,’” Jonathan quoted with a cheeky grin.
I grinned back “Everyone knows that one. It’s not my favorite, though.”
“What would that be?”
“It’s a tie. The first is ‘the death of earth is to become water, and the death of water is to become air, and the death of air is to become fire, and reversely.’ That one helped me a lot when I thought of my dad. He was on my mind a lot in those days. This idea—that all things become something else, rather than just disappearing into nothing—I guess it was comforting at the time.”
I looked into the fire in front of us, which suddenly made me feel even more warm and comforted in this house that used to belong to Gran. The blue-black center of the flames arrested my gaze for a moment, and I thought that anything might fit into that tiny spot.
“And the other?” Jonathan’s voice brought me back to the room, and I looked up to find him watching me expectantly, his chin perched atop a casually bent knee.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s Fragment Eighty-Five. It goes, ‘It is hard to fight with one’s heart’s desire, for…’”
“‘It will pay with soul for what it craves,’” Jonathan finished. His eyes, mirroring the orange, flickering light of the fire, watched me intently.
We stared at each other for what seemed like at least a minute. I swallowed, hard, and forced myself to look back down to my cup as I raised it to my lips for a long drink.
“So, yeah,” I continued when my heart had stopped beating quite so hard. “I remember marveling at how these lines, these silly, little lines written thousands of years ago, spelled out everything about me, everything about the experience of, well, life, I guess. It’s a na?ve thing to think, but I was young.”
“You’re still young. And it may be na?ve, but not necessarily wrong,” Jonathan said. The fire flickered again in his eyes. Or were they glittering because he was Seeing me in that way only he could?
I swallowed. “Perhaps.”
He cleared his throat and looked away. “Did the Greek help? With Irish, that is?”
“In a way,” I admitted. “I took an independent study on Yeats, focusing on the archives. The Burns Library has the largest collection of Yeats’s papers outside of Ireland, in case you didn’t know.”
“I did not,” Jonathan admitted, though he seemed happy to let me go on.
“They also had borrowed a copy of A Vision as an original manuscript.” I sighed. “I remember opening the page to a section where he talks about Heraclitus. Not the water quote, but the other famous one about gods and man.”
“‘Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life,’” Jonathan recited.
“That’s the one. And for whatever reason, I decided to take off a glove. I felt so drawn to it, but I didn’t understand why. And when I touched the words, I Saw him.”
Jonathan sat up straight. “What do you mean, you ‘saw him’?”
I shrugged. “No, I mean I Saw him. Yeats. As in, I touched the page, and he had touched it too at some point. And I felt his intent. His knowledge. His confusion. His struggle. Yeats was fae.”
“Yes, I knew that.” His voice was a bit sharper than I would have expected.
I frowned. “Oh. Is it common knowledge?”
Jonathan peered at me carefully. “He was a seer like you thought. A famous one. I’m surprised Penny didn’t tell you, since he visited the Aran Islands.”
I frowned. “What would that matter? It would have been way before she was born.”
Jonathan gave me a strange look, then appeared to relax. “Well, what did you See?”
I shrugged. “I Saw…his confusion. His passion. How much he loved others and wanted them to love him and his people too. But how hard he found it in his isolation I suppose in that moment, I Saw myself too.” I shrugged. “That was it. I was hooked. I wrote my thesis on Yeats, and then of course realized how much more I could learn about my past when I started to consult older texts. Archival bits. Things real people had written, not just sent to the printers. It took me a bit longer to finish—I had to spend a few years learning all three versions of Irish, plus Ogham too.”
“Did it keep happening? These visions?” Jonathan pressed.
“Not every time. But the older I got, yeah. The more I could See.”
“Just from touching the paper?”
I nodded. “Pretty much. Anyway, after that, I was hooked. I came home at Christmas and told Gran my plans to learn Irish and Latin and runes so I could read as many of the original texts as I could. She laughed and thought it was marvelous—she said the myths had a foot in the truth of fae history anyway. If I wasn’t going to learn it from her, I might as well learn it on my own.”
“She never told you the stories?” Jonathan looked around the house like Penny would pop out and tell him what he wanted to know. “Not even when you were living with her?”
I shook my head. “No. She said it wasn’t the right time. It was very frustrating, let me tell you. Even more now, considering this…inheritance.”
Jonathan chuckled. “For you, I imagine it was. So you understand old Irish and Latin?”
“Yes, but I’m still learning. I’d have to immerse myself to learn either of them properly, and since both are dead languages…”
“You do have an opportunity to live in Ireland,” Jonathan pointed out. “In a Gaeltacht, I might point out. It’s not old Irish, but it wouldn’t get more immersive than that.”
I didn’t answer. I had wondered about that, actually, but I wasn’t going to tell him so.
“Do you speak any other old languages?” Everything about him tightened. The tendons of his forearms suddenly appeared, and his right toe twitched.
“Not well,” I said slowly, watching as the lines of his body released the tension they had assumed just a moment before. “Just Irish and Latin, and a bit of ancient Greek because I had to. But I can’t speak any of them. That’s why they’re called dead.”
Jonathan rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. “Yes, I know that. But surely you realize they’re not really dead.”
I frowned. “I do?”
To avoid his shocked gaze, I put another log on the fire. It gave a loud pop as I returned to my sheepskin.
“Cassandra. That’s essentially what spell craft is. Old languages. Seers, shifters, sirens, sorcerers. We all have our own versions of it. ”
I blinked, feeling rather like an owl. “Um. What?”
He sighed. “Another thing Penny didn’t teach you?”
I nodded, cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “She told me just to focus on Seeing. Let it come naturally. I know a few spells out of necessity, but mostly she just wanted me to learn by doing until I came home again after school.”
I couldn’t help the mounting frustration in my voice.
“Do you have a favorite?” I wondered, suddenly eager to change the subject. “Since you’re a fan and all.”
Jonathan seemed to think on that for a bit. “Of Yeats? Out of everything?”
I tipped my head. “So you are a fan. Let’s just say from ‘Oisin’ and other poems, then.”
With a proud wink, he cleared his throat and recited again:
Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
I nodded, rather impressed. I could recite a few poems, but this was what I did for a living. Jonathan had a very good memory indeed.
“Why that one?” I asked. “I’ve always found ‘The Falling of Leaves’ rather melancholy.”
“And you a seer,” Jonathan chided.
“What do you mean?”
“The next stanza,” he prodded. “Think about it.”
I tipped my head back, trying to recall what came next. “‘The hour of the waning of love has beset us’…”
“‘And weary and worn are our sad souls now,’” Jonathan continued.
“It’s sad,” I said. “Fall has come, and it’s pretty obviously mourning the loss of the summer.”
“Well, of course, he’s sad. He’s losing that summer tryst. But think about what comes after,” Jonathan said. “It’s only a seer, someone acutely aware of the power of memory, who would talk about the impressions the lovers leave on the world to carry forward rather than what they will take with them, don’t you think?”
I closed my eyes, trying to remember the next verses. “‘Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us’–oh, you’re right. I’d forgotten about that. He’s more worried about passion forgetting the lovers than the other way around, isn’t he?”
“‘With a kiss on a tear on thy drooping brow,’” Jonathan finished quietly.
Again, we stared at each other across the room, once again transfixed by Yeats’s melodic words.
This is how it begins , I found myself thinking. This is how people fall in love .
It’s not a lightning bolt or a clap of thunder. It’s slow and uncertain, when words and thoughts connect, and the unique magic they create makes two people one.
I wasn’t in love with Jonathan Lynch. Not anything remotely close to it.
But for the first time in my life, I understood how it might happen. And oddly enough, it didn’t scare me like I would have thought. Here, in the haze of the fire and the odd spell of poetry, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
Jonathan slid onto his back and crossed his feet, now outstretched completely on the hide. I recognized the signs of a scholar sinking into his mind as his hands began gesturing the way most of my professors did when they were deep in thought.
I folded my arms behind my head to think with him. Of philosophy. Of poetry. Of love instead of loss. I wasn’t yet ready to let the evening go. And that, I realized, was a memory I wanted this place to hold when I was gone.
It was nice to realize I had a choice.