It was as though she were writing her memoirs
on black paper with black ink—
all the words were there; all the flourishes,
but nothing was revealed; all was sealed
in a penumbra of dark matter,
the events were camoflaged
like Elizabethan blackwork on black satin.
But by cloaking her identity
in enigmatic conundrums and deliberate
inscrutability, she paid a price.
She became an insoluable riddle,
like the locked-room mysteries
of John Dickson Carr. The onion-peel layers
of her profundity hardened into inpenetrable
shields, entrapping her heart
and all her emotions.
Inevitably, she became a phantom,
a blackbird in the night,
so perfectly absorbed in obscurity
that not only can we not see her,
she can no longer see herself.
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