Something is wrong with my poet.
Whenever he journeys through my forests, he no longer walks with a lightness in his step. Instead, he stumbles into the hills with his hands crammed into his coat pockets, his elbows jutting out from his sides at mismatched angles, his shoulders tense. His violet-gray eyes have faded to the smoky hue of skies in bleak December. Side-whiskers grow in fuzzy patches on his cheeks, lending him an older appearance, and a grave one at that. He looks more like a tobacco merchant than a carefree dreamer.
He invokes me no longer. He simply kicks aside pine cones and sits in silence beneath the trees, staring out at the world below him. Garland doesn’t even follow him, and I wonder if O’Peale, too, has weakened. The rogue should have collaborated with me.
Feathers have ceased sprouting from my neck and my spine, and my hunger for words gnaws at my stomach until I feel empty and sick, until I no longer possess the strength to wander through the trees. Cobwebs dangle from my forehead and creep across my dress in sticky clumps that cling to my fingers whenever I fight to brush them away. Spiders crawl down my arms on spindly legs. My throat often aches, as though John Allan grips my neck in his hands. I even smell the scent of his tobacco in the forest air.
Some nights I fall flat onto my face in the churchyard, as drunk as a lord, and the spirits rush to pick me off the ground and lay me across the sepulcher where I now sleep with my misty Jane, who no longer fears holding me against her.
I still haven’t ever tasted a single drop of alcohol.
I know who’s blurring my brain with peach and honey down at the university.
I know who isn’t thinking of his poetry.