"Bulletins of the Broken-Hearted" by Ian C. Smith

Minor characters from my past play walk-on roles in my dreams.  Precise details: the huskiness of a woman’s voice, the neatness of a long-ago boss’s moustache, cameo appearances with those closer to me in life’s hurly-burly, my regulars, intrigue me.  The only part of an early story by John Updike I remember was when the narrator described the past as a vast sheet of darkness where a few random moments, pinpricks of light, briefly shine.  Reading Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld’s witty modern take on Pride and Prejudice, reminds me how much art makes of misunderstood information, sexual and social tension, the giddiness of thin secrets, small things lit by hope or darkened with despair.  Before mobile phones, noisily busy in an adjoining room, I once heard the staccato of a long message being left on my answering machine.  When I had time to play it, optimistically expectant, to my utter horror it had vanished due to a connection fault.  I never learned who believed I had received it without response.  These missed instances transport me to student days and Angel’s letter under a rug in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

My serendipitous discovery of Yeats’ early poem, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, also before mobile phones, came about when, like a character in an old monochrome movie, I lifted an antimacassar on my club armchair, exposing a hidden letter.  A nephew, my house-sitter during recent travels then, had a girlfriend, the letter’s addressee.  Did she hear his approach, slip the letter from sight, then later forget it?  Aswarm with voyeuristic conjecture, I read it, mind-chuckling about this connection to novelists’ formulae of letters found too late or never.  Someone with a European name travelling by bus around northern Australia gazing on an endless panoramic heat shimmer covered a page describing this before getting to the point: his unrequited, perhaps ended, love for my nephew’s girlfriend.  His heart’s slender hope bled all over the rest of the pages, awkward syntax charging its poignancy.  Conscripting the young Yeats to illustrate his adoration, the poor guy reduced that effect by transcribing the gorgeous ‘Cloths’ as ‘Clothes’.

Now, my mind a maelstrom of memories, I wonder if that lovelorn swain recalls his paean to the girl he had lost to my nephew who, though no longer her partner, is still in touch with her.  Do his thoughts return to the landscape between Broome and Darwin when he felt dizzy with desire for a girl who is now growing old and drinks too much?  Do pangs of lost love, its accompanying dolour, linger?  His added postscript: ‘No more beautiful words were ever written.  Isn’t it you and me?’ followed Yeats’ poem.  Perhaps with Maud Gonne on his ardent youthful mind, Yeats closed with: I have spread my dreams under your feet;/ Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.  One thing that young man lonely on a bus achieved was his inadvertent introduction to me of what would become my favourite poem, so rich is its tapestry of swooning loveliness.  I wish I could dance the tightrope of language with that broken-hearted scribe who heard the tyres moan, leaving all his dreams behind, as my reading life whizzed by.