Mary Grimm
The Marriage of Poets May Sarton and Henry David Thoreau, a Union Unconsummated Due to Issues of Time and Space as Well as to Differences of Temperament and Gender Preference
May embraces her solitude, but when no one comes to visit she is annoyed.
Henry prefers to sit on a pumpkin, if only he can be alone.
May paints her toenails red. Not the fingernails, which would be a show of vanity. (May is vain but she is too vain to want anyone to know it.) The color matches her new sweater.
Henry reminds us that the purpose of clothing is to retain body heat.
No green beans in May’s garden: she devotes herself to the evanescence and color of flowers, which she gathers at daybreak so that they may come into the house and die.
May likes to do things herself, unless they are time consuming or difficult. When workmen come she has them into the house for tea. If they are charming, she may write a poem about them.
Henry is the original DIY-er.
Long ago, May met Virginia Woolf, who was not as interested in her as May would have liked. May has a recurring dream in which she and Virginia have a fist fight and May wins.
Henry certainly didn’t retire to the woods to lick the wounds inflicted by transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s rejection of his poem. (She encouraged him to submit again, noting that it did not fit the needs of The Dial at that time.)
The ocean is better than a mere pond, May thinks, and only what she deserves. She too though would like to suck the marrow out of life, and is not opposed to driving life into a corner, for its own good.
In her garden, May paces up and down, letting the balm of nature soothe her. She is a devil when it comes to weeds. If she could buy a flamethrower to burn them into ash, she would.
Is it Thoreau as the French say it? Or does it sound the same as “thorough?”
May gets an enormous amount of mail. Perhaps she should hire a secretary to deal with it? Perhaps the secretary might be an attractive woman who wouldn’t mind having a dozen or so poems written in her honor in lieu of payment?
Thoreau is so shy that he blushes when he passes through the Emersons’ kitchen where their two young maids are working.
May hikes on the solstice on Monadnock Mountain. Up there, the air and her mind are clear. She is one of the greatest poets alive: why is this not more widely recognized?
On the banks of Walden, Henry ponders the wrongheaded Englishman who went to India to make a fortune so he could come home to write poetry.
If May were a younger woman, she might have joined the army. She would have enjoyed the camaraderie and the violence (she has a terrible temper). She understands though that the food is terrible.
Henry prefers a night in jail.
Once, when May was a child, she stood on Pemaquid Point, her mouth open, her toes gripping the rock. She sang out her defiance to the world while her mother took her picture and pronounced her a darling.
Once, when Henry was a young man, he stood among the wood shavings of his father’s pencil factory, and dreamed of looking deep into earth’s eye.
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection), and a number of flash pieces in places like Helen, The Citron Review, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on an urban fantasy set in the flats area of a near-future, dystopian Cleveland.
