She was born to wealth; nobody noticed.
She grew up unattended;
nobody bothered to speak her name.

She identified with Edith Sitwell,
thought herself a hideous changeling
left on the doorstep by fairies,
believed her manor to be haunted.

She emerged a dark, mischievous woman,
reckless in social amenities,
her only companion an imaginary sister
with whom she quarreled.

Adrift in the absurdity of a Beckett play,
she aged in isolation, surrounded
by weathered books, in a moldy
Gothic bastion overlooking the dunes.

Reading was a passion, a religion; surprisingly,
she preferred English poets of the Romantic period.
Her favorite Wordsworth line: Little we see
in Nature is ours. She thought
anything written after Keats a waste of time.
We are, cried this doyenne of neglected
literature, overwhelmed by lamplight compositions
accumulated each year in print.

By day she walked the beach cursing the gulls.
By night she accommodated her moody bats.
She moved through the world crabwise, fearful
of confronting herself in the shadows that lay ahead.