In the Bird Museum

I was apprenticed to the frenzied atmosphere, the verandas that open into dark wind...Bowen is apprenticed to the "frenzied atmosphere" and in it she finds the crucial minutiae, in it she finds skirts of night and a woman's heart as a wind-up bird. Bowen's poetry is where we go to read that heart-as old- time paper valentine and as fist of flesh: valved and valued...letters written with the bones of birds. So it is, so it was that Here, we came for the ghost of the word/ inside the other word: and here, in the bird museum we are haunted by all that is visual as it is visceral and Bowen, playful, brilliant, curator, reminds us that this place is a synaesthete's playground--where the eye partakes in the delicious but no less-so than the ear, for here: If you listen, you can hear the holes in the alphabet, sounds lit by the lamps of our bones. Like birds we might even rise, our lamp-lit bones: luminous and...fly in a perfect line. Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis