I sat this afternoon in a grove reading Shelley. The sky was bright and the heat of the early spring a portent of things to come. The pages turned, the poetry passed, the phrases came to me with ease. I saw ancient lands that dissolved and rearranged as quickly as clouds. I saw fleeting glimpses of storied citadels and fiery furnaces. I saw riders on horseback pushing themselves toward an infinity of grandeur. My breath halted; I had finished the book.

Sighing to myself, it was lucky I had brought something else to read on this happy warm day. Another work sat beside me on a bench, of related and equal importance.

This new thing was the novel of his wife Mary, an immense book in some respects, a little book in others. I thought of them together, I thought of the dinner party with Lord Byron in Geneva when they’d each agreed to write a frightening tale—in her case, a classic to be. Had it come to her easily? Was it in some respects a presentiment of her approaching grief, Percy’s death at the age of twenty-nine, in a dreadful sailing accident? How do we remake the ones we’ve lost? Can they only be demonic when we’ve cobbled them back together by fragments, and by memories? The sky was turning a brighter shade of blue as I thought of Percy and Mary and their antique love; then I thought of my own lost loves, some that had drifted away, others that had collapsed in on themselves like ailing stars. Being alone was now a balm and not a travesty—at least not when Riverside Park was green and the sun shone down on me so freely.

Oh grief, which makes its home in human hearts, art thou not a monstrosity? Cursed be Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and raised us from our lowly origins. Cursed be the phantoms and phantasms that haunt our quiet moments, when all we would like to have is the peace which I, for a brief moment, experienced in that golden grove at the start of the spring, as I began to stitch together the many severed pieces of myself.

Soon enough I left the grove and went home, both Shelleys tucked snuggly under my arm. Reunited at last.

“The Funeral of Shelley,” Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889. Edward John Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, l-r. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.