at Fruitlands they ate just vegetables that grew up,
not down, and no animals, and took only cold baths,
never warm, making a virtue of oddity and penury,
which they did in Bronson’s daughter’s book
as well, wearing the one good glove and holding
the other spoiled one as a signifier. having never
enough to eat. a pocket of limes the unlikely
best fetish to brandish at the spoiled rich girls.
the best part was the storytelling and the play-
acting and music-making, but it never stops
the precious sister from dying. and thus:
marriage, to save them all, even if it meant
inventing a German professor, also impoverished,
emerging to interrupt Jo’s governessing
with a beautiful lieder. I read this ceaselessly
as a girl, riding my bike to the library
to check it out again, to fall under the moral
and, let it be said, sensual spell of this house
of girls and their life in the attic. I lay
on my side on the bed, the book propped up,
turning the pages with my free hand. the sisters
were lovely, I know they were, and better
than the fate the plot dealt them, despite
that spiffed-up father to revise the difficult
real one, and their goodness extracted
from their impulses and moods: the pages
and pages of Jo’s writing, twice burned,
first in a sister’s pique, second in self-reproach:
can love bring back those pages? can goodness?
I only wished to postpone the one marriage, to let
the story pause before the ashes.