A Poem by Gareth Prior

An Adventure

Eleanor Frances Jourdain, 1863-1924

Admittedly, the charm of being ghosted
by one’s own job-satisfaction couldn’t last —
not in some crazed regression to the past
with colleagues whose intellects are better wasted —

all of which made it time to fly the cage,
leave that excess of eighteenth-century terrace
eterne in mediocritie: I’ll flourish
better somewhere that’s acting its own age.

Half a mile north, for instance. Miss Jourdain
shimmers across the hallway half aglow
with tales of Versailles haunting, stops mid-flow —
catching a living eye, the dead refrain…

but what possessed me? Other ghosts converge,
collegiate, then the cracks begin to show
(even in Arcadia, there’s ego).
Something’s amiss. The factions split and merge,

choreographed. Relations cool to ice.
Somebody knocks. The door shakes like a warning —
quadrangular men, begowned and hooded, fawning.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

Not quite a century later over prawn
dim sum in Zheng: “Jourdain had gone to Paris
to finish a book on Dante, so encounters
with the dead…” But the theory peters out: your phone

intrudes like an Attic messenger with news
D---- P------- has died offstage.
You lose a breath
jolting the content-rhyme of love and death —
‘They flee from me’ – and edging every sadness

his long affair with E., her nova mind
collapsing to cancer’s gravity.
Too soon
(waiters impatient, lights) it’s time to leave —

MacNeice’s moon still over Jericho, moonblind
Venus above the towpath as you turn —
the water’s dark a fleeting rhyme for love.

“Halfway to the Petit Trianon,
we found ourselves in the eighteenth century,
missing the path. When all at once, a man —

smallpox and villain’s hat, fairytale-ugly —
lurched from the rippled fabric of the past
somewhere the modern visitor can’t see

(confirmed from archival maps, long since demolished);
another rushed, as if to fight a duel
or re-enact some ritual. Spooked, we crossed

the bridge that this week’s research can now reveal
existed at least till 1836,
which proves that… Quiet! You at the back there, girl —

whatever’s amusing, share it with the class
or explain yourself in private. To resume:
crossing the bridge we felt a fresh unease,

threads from the tattered edges of a dream
someone or something hunted — and the puzzle
that I was the one who didn’t see the queen

resplendent in plain disguise, the merely regal
hidden — living again her last free hours
of fraught prolepsis: prison, cart, the people

thronging the waxwork scaffold where she stars.”

Straightaway went Rumour through the halls and colleges of Oxford —
all ears, many-tongued and handsy,
co-opting panelled gossip —
the foghorn whisperings of the bewigged slug
and strains of the incontinent contrarian —
this not Versailles but 1924:
Eleanor Jourdain demits as Principal
and dies.

Rewind the tape:
blink of incarceration and escape.

Imagine a plain locked room, plain curtains drawn;
pristine white tablecloth, clock, no hands in sight.
Calm as the written word she sits upright,
living and dead for an instant — dislocation

missing the moment heartbreak, hope, disease
vanish, the greater part of her already
laughing like Troilus whirled above the heady
novelisation’s mere complexities:

freed now from love’s embodied loss as we
are not (‘mortality mirrored in another’
– Ashe, private correspondence with the author)
she smooths the perfect starch of memory.

There are no guests this evening: I’m alone
addressing a packed St Hugh’s Night where no ghost
-ly ospiti (the word both guest and host)
trouble the blacktied rapture — or the groan

of students who’ve heard the speeches drag too long,
knowing we’ll find no moral in a story
fashioned as neither fact nor allegory.
Give up the ghost; leave haunting to the living.

There in the mirrored world beyond the text —
joyous, condemned, ephemeral, hot-blooded —
nobody breaches Purgatory to drink

the wine-breath, and no spirit leaves the hexed
walls of a stanza written for the dead.
The medium of ghosts, my love, is ink.

Gareth Prior is the author of three pamphlets and a full collection. His recent work has appeared in PN Review, Subtropics, Bad Lilies, and other places.