I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human DaysMacLane, Mary
General
I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days
MacLane, Mary
MacLane, Mary, 1881-1929; Montana -- Biography; Women authors, American -- Biography
Into her dull veins pours a hot stream like melted seething copper
and it heats her knees till she knows she _has_ knees and that they
are white and very beautiful: and it heats her legs and her back and
her breasts till they glow with the double-glow of an Aphrodite’s in
a reluctant Adonis’s arms: it heats her eyes and temples and throat
till she feels herself a radiant girl: it heats the crown of her
head till she feels something like a brain there: it heats her heart
and stomach till she’s filled with a gay gust for life: it heats her
imagination till she even imagines herself in love with her hard
Finn husband since he is not by to beat her and so dispel the fancy:
it heats a sense of humor into her till she laughs suddenly and
heartily at some fugitive funniness that had lain long frozen in her
memory: it heats a hundred little human carburetors in her which send
a wreathe of vapors up into her drab being to flush it with misty
golds and thin blues and rosy crimsons till her dormant involuntary
soul awakes--a thing of old mellowed beauty, it may be--and is
wafted on warm pretty vapory wings far from alleys, far from mops
and scrubbing-brushes, far from thirty-five cents an hour, far from
doorsteps--to fair sweet Isles of the Blest!
Nearing the last of her pint bottles she reels sideways on the
doorstep: her bad hat cants forward: she sprawls about. The
policeman on that beat to whom in that aspect she is a figure long
familiar strolls toward her late in the night and looks at her with
a lackluster eye. But Josephina is physically unaware of all this
world. Her last pint bottle is gamely emptied, her inner sun’s
chromosphere burns like mad--but her body, unable to cope with the
virile delectations new-risen within it, limply gives way.
A quaint picture, interesting to dwell on: her thick bathless body
laid low in the darkened alley, with the empty pint bottles scattered
on the paving-stones beside it--but her astral shape, lit by the
subtle fires of alcohol, lifted high, high to remote elysiums. The
policeman calls the ‘wagon’ and Josephina is taken up by several
ungentle hands and tossed into it like a sack of coal. They take her
to the city jail and lock her in a cell. The next morning she stands
jaded and morbidly intoxicated before a police judge who glances at
her uninterestedly for the several-hundredth time and says five days.
The five days can not be pleasant days but Josephina owns a robust
sporting spirit. She gives not so much as the shrug of a shoulder
either at going into jail or coming out of it. A black eye from her
husband, a broken arm from a drunken fall, a filthy sojourn in jail:
all one to her. She accepts them as she accepts all of her life, with
an immense psychic calm. But she takes strongly to drink to translate
herself out of it. And let her drink.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account