Lady Caroline Blackwood

Reading "Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood" and feeling very alone, as alone as she must have felt, reading at 4:45 a.m. by lamplight in the big old living room.

When I couldn't sleep, not used to not sleeping with Lea Ann, the poet's words (I'm pretty sure it was Arthur Gregor), 'humming, humming, and an empty bed' fall like rain falls, one drop sounding like another. The words themselves seem to be leading me down the stairs, providing safe passage in the dark as long as I listen to them. Humming, humming, and an empty bed.

In the living room I settle in the big black chair, and open "Dangerous Muse". I'm on p. 144, just after Lady Caroline has left the painter Lucian Freud for the composer Israel Citkowitz, who she would not-too-much-later leave for the poet Robert Lowell. Sometime in-between these marriages and other liasions, the photographer Walker Evans, a much older man, took a keen interest in Caroline. His portrait of her is on the cover of the book, and is now the property of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.