The Split Heart: Carta Marina by Ann Fisher-Wirth
Part II, The Coming of Winter, shows her trying to deny the presence of this spectre and its ravaging effect on her life. In “December 3” (pp. 38-39), on the deck of a boat at night, she admits that Peter and she “wanted something more… / … like dark, like sleep, pouring through all the marrow of our bones,” until they saw the “borealis” “glimmering over the trees”: a glimpse of understanding in the confusion of thought, of her “guilt.” In “March 22” (p. 58), she maps the future for us, as if to reassure with clear navgation lines: “He and I will rarely see each other, never / sleep together,” even though in “April 3. In the Restaurant” (pp. 61-62), she wants to “lie down together / ah, but how? … for I love my husband / for his wife is not my enemy.” Murder belongs to the past; in the present it is denied consciousness and turned inward: “Take me take me take me river.”
In Part III, Les très riches heures, she goes to Paris with Peter to meet her former lover and his wife:
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April was… — “April 10. Vaxjo,” p. 68
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Spring reaches the European north not long before their leaving Sweden, albeit with her “heart still split” (“April 20,” pp. 74-75). We are treated to the soft assonances of the s’s and t’s in the following lines, the delicate insect a contrast to the monsters that inhabit the ancient map:
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Light saturating this bowl Promiscuous indiscriminate without reck or care — “April 30,” p. 74
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