With Lines from Virginia Woolf

by Jennifer Franklin 

 

1.

I belong to quick futile moments of intense feeling.

Yes, I belong to moments. Not to people. Never

to people with their unyielding bodies, their incessant needs.

The way they must be tended to at the same time

each day—food, walk around the garden, sleep.

Yes, moments—fierce, furtive, fleeting. Finished

but not gone. Finished but present, an after-image,

the glow of the small front garden in the summer

house on the island. The sound of the waves on the beach

reaching me in my cool nursery sheets. The shadows

the curtain made on the floorboards. Father’s library

tight on the shelves like secrets wanting to be found.

The dog asleep in the bushes, her soft body rising

with her slow breath. The water always calling me home. 

2.

Nothing has really happened until it has been described.

Not the walks through the park, the sun streaming

through the bushes, not watching for the eclipse­—all

of us together on the hill, waiting for the grass to darken.

Not the sound of the waves beating the beach as I lay

in the nursery, light lifting the curtains. Nothing

has happened, not the unwanted touch, not the lies,

not the doctors’ exams or their condescending theories.

Not the conversations in brocaded rooms, my sharp

tongue keeping the tumult of what plagues me at bay.

Not the gardens—the fat peonies wide as fists.

And not the dog running through the garden,

endlessly believing she will reach a sparrow before

it lifts its small singing body into the elm.