I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

by Mary MacLane

To M— T—

these Live Fruits
from the Withered Garden

[Contents]

• [A crucible of my own making]
• [Half inevitably, half by choice]
• [A twisted moral]
• [Everyday and to-morrow]
• [A mathematic dead-wall]
• [My neat blue chair]
• [A lost person]
• [A thin damnedness]
• [A prison of self]
• [A winding sheet]
• [The Dover road]
• [The harp of worn strings]
• [A strongly-windy Saturday]
• [A someway separate individual]
• [Sincerity and despair]
• [It’s not death]
• [A human prerogative]
• [The merciless beauty]
• [My shoes]
• [An eerie quality]
• [A helliad]
• [Swift go my days]
• [By the blood of dead Americans]
• [To express me]
• [Bastard lacy valentines]
• [Sweet fine sweatings of blood]
• [Instinct—a ‘first law’]
• [Loose twos]
• [Knitting or plaiting straw]
• [A life-long lonely word]
• [Their voices]
• [My damns]
• [To God, care of the whistling winds]
• [A working diaphragm]
• [Lot’s wife]
• [My echoing footsteps]
• [A comfortably vicious person]
• [In my black dress and my still room]
• [Their little shoes]
• [The sleep of the dead]
• [Stickily mad]
• [God compensates me]
• [The strange braveness]
• [Just beneath my skin]
• [God’s kindly caprice]
• [A fascinating creature]
• [No resonance]
• [Black-browed Wednesdays]
• [The conscious analyst]
• [Eye when I mean tooth]
• [A wild mare]
• [The mist]
• [A white liner]
• [Beneficent bedlam]
• [A deathly pathos]
• [The necklace]
• [Slyly garbling and cross-purposing]
• [Not quite voilà-tout]
• [A damned spider]
• [To wander and hang and float about]
• [A thousand kisses]
• [A fluttering-moth wish]
• [Twenty inches of ajarness]
• [A profoundly delicious idea]
• [A mountebank’s cloak]
• [A familiar sharp twist]
• [A dark bright fierce fire]
• [Late afternoon]
• [An ancient witch-light]
• [The gray-purple]
• [The subdivided cell]
• [Food and fire]
• [The edge of mist-and-silver]
• [A right shape and size]
• [Ice-water, corrosive acid and human breath]
• [Rhythm]
• [A prayer-feeling]

I, MARY MACLANE