Posted by Wendy on 3/3/2005, 10:21 pm Unlike you, I do not wear trousers tucked in hunting boots, linen shirt borrrowed from the closet of Chopin. My figure stays laced in a lady's gown where hooks and strings lure a gentleman's hand. I have felt pianist, doctor and sculptor loosen garments and gather-soft the blanched skin of bed or drawing room habitats. Your fingers have pulled an arrow from the stag's rib, used a cigar to appoximate the joy of an evening smoke. Mine have only drawn a quill from the ink well and stopped a taper rolling aimlessly across the floor. You have taken a man's name and burned Aurore on a pyre of books you will never read. I am still called Sophie, acting soft and sainted like the woman they named a cathedral after in Istanbul. Yet, when cattails absorb the moon's silver ink, I slip away from her and scavenge the marshes for something raw and wild. I write and wear the wing-spread shawl of the night heron; yes, a small huntress compared to you, but still she haunts the water's edge seizing one cool flash Hours, I have waited, waited to taste the right word, to flip its slippery cadence in my throat. And what joy to turn a thought, a catch more brilliant than any spawned in wetlands bordered by Sand. Note -- George Sand was the penname of 19th Century novelist, Aurore Lucille Dupin. She was a woman who defied convention, dressed in men's clothing, smoked cigars, hunted and conducted several affairs with luminaries like Frederic Chopin, poet, Afred de Musset, and author, Gustave Flaubert. She was thought to be brash, sexually perverted and a little insane by conventional society. Her books often explored the theme of erotic passion and the consequences women suffered for expressing it. Here, a contemporary writer addresses her rival, Ms. Sand, in an elegant but sarcastic way. It's interesting to think how other women writers of the time might have viewed her. Some favorably , others with envy and perhaps, disdain.
209.179.141.227
(A woman addresses her contemporary, George Sand.)
then another.
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