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When he is a child – if he is ever a child, in the commonplace sense – Ben sits for hours with opened volumes of poetry from the Old Republic to copy them down as practice.
He watches the words unscroll from his pen in decisive, tensile arcs, like the whorls of a festival kite through the upper air, lifting him out of himself and filling him with the inviolable peace of perfect concentration. He is by then reaching an age when his mother has begun to tell him he is too big to go around breaking stuff whenever he gets angry, an especially important thing to remember because Ben can break stuff without even touching it; his father has begun to tell him how it is not nice to interrupt people while they are speaking, an especially important thing to remember because Ben can look inside people’s heads to see what they are planning to say and technically they do not have to be speaking at all.
Ben likes his red calligraphy ink, best, although when he rolls up his sleeves to keep from spoiling the page it always leaves stains on the blue-veined skin of his hands and wrists; they come away with bright traces of the letters still dripping from them and Ben must haul himself up against the sink to wash them off.
Words, laughs that better and truer voice from the root of his brain. Look what false power they have, look what little they really mean.
It is not until twenty years later, however, that Ben pays much attention to the words themselves.
The first verse returns to him one day in prodigal suddenness while he is meddling with the Falcon’s deflector field generator. It jerks and thumps at a steady throttle and he has an ear laid against it to listen for the telltale whine of a faulty oxygen sensor.
The thumping forms a pattern he follows idly by tapping two long fingers on his knee: one-two, one-two, one-two, one-two, and then the words from a long-dead Kelestrian nobleman tumble and transpose themselves inside his head for an instant before they are shaken loose into his consciousness.
I’d give thee, Girl, were I a king
Throne, scepter, empire, everything –
Ben extracts himself from behind the quaking generator. His wife, absorbed in picking emptied porg’s nest fragments out of the forward airlock, glances up at him when he sweeps past her. Tufted gray feathers stick to her hair.
“What, is it the hydrogen pump again?” Rey calls after him. “There’s a mechanic on Atollon who owes me a favor. Just don’t let him tell you his joke about the nerf herder and the milk maid.”
“Is it the one with the tipped bucket?” Ben says. “Lando told me that when I was eight.”
“No, it’s a different one.”
He goes to the workbench and rummages a slip of paper from beneath its other accumulated odds and ends; Rey keeps several large jars filled with the bottle caps she has hammered flat, the keys she has twisted from packaged tin cans of meat and the foil cracker bags from which she has licked the salt. By the time Ben locates a pen, a sharpened nib, and a block of resin ink, he has remembered another two lines and scribbles them down.
And were I a god, I’d give the air
The earth, the sea, the heavens fair –
He halts.
He taps the pen, one-two, one-two, but the rest is gone, so he folds the paper into quarters and with a flounce of his wrist he drops it through an unseen pocket in the fabric of space and time.
Twenty feet away, Rey gives a whoop of surprise as though a spider has fallen down her shirtfront. She flaps around until she discovers the paper, caught within her robes, and Ben keeps his back steadily towards her while she reads it.
Rey refolds the paper along its creases and tucks it between her breasts again.
“You’ve given me better than all that,” she says. Her brow quirks. “Want to hear the joke?”
He recalls the other poems in smaller pieces, which Ben half-suspects are partially verses of his own invention wherever the original, more precise memories have failed him. He figures he is allowed this artistic liberty, as a man who has been raised from the dead at least once; he is still not quite sure what properly qualifies as a death.
He scrunches the papers into balls, tosses them sportively over his shoulder, and three worlds away they come down to bounce off Rey’s head.
There are two births; the one when light
First strikes the new-made eye and sense;
The other comes when two souls unite
And thus I count my life from thence.
They appear while she is on Hoth, turning out her pockets to shake the snow from them. They materialize within her boots while she is knocking the sand and pebbles clear on Tatooine. She discovers them rolled into spindles and tucked secretively through her hair like flowers, arranged into the shapes of birds and perched on her caf cup’s handle or placed beneath her pillow like wishes as she lays down to sleep in the double-berth beside him.
My debt to you, Beloved, is one I cannot pay
In any coin of any realm on any reckoning day;
For where is he shall count the debt, when all is done and said
To the one who makes you dream again when all the dreams were dead?
Rey never says anything else about the poetry to him, at least not out loud, which is unusual given his wife’s propensity for having an opinion on everyone and everything else. Ben must suppose she likes it for its joyful, extravagant purposelessness, coming as she does from a planet where it rains only once every hundred years and therefore a place where tears are regarded as a spendthrift indulgence.
Set me as a signet ring upon your heart
And as a shield upon your arm.
He composes each piece hunched over the paper, stopping on occasion to push the hair back from his eyes. In such places, in such unfamiliar attitudes of repose, Ben will look backwards down the long, narrow way of years to the child at his calligraphy, with the dark disordered mind and the bright red hands – the child he still is, in an uncommon sense, although the mask and name that would have once absorbed the child’s pain for him are both gone – and he will think of other words that he does not write down.
I forgive you, he says, to the boy. I forgive you, I forgive you.
(Rey saves the papers in an orowood box, all of them stacked neatly atop one another and all of them still marked by the fragile gestures of Ben’s hands.
She does not lose a single one.)
…