Light as a soul or a
Lullaby bird, she
Loops a daisy chain, for
Little hands have flown about,
Lighting up the trees, while
Little mouths in perfect Os are
Laughing by the hours.
Flor
O, flor of the flores!
What little heart doth beat inside?
The green-stem loop – a slender tail –
That bends into a silver pail
Where all the sorrows go.
The sun above is kissing thee,
Thy face is all aglow!
Trailing Roses
The little girl trailing roses in a pirouette-line paraded straight through Charles Park, by the geese by the water-spitting basin by the gray man in a charcoal news cap sleeping on a bench, and as she moved she hummed Lully lullay lully lullay. The roses she pulled from a white wicker basket hanging by her left arm: and she pulled with an unpracticed charm, a delight to the old women who popped into the backs of churches, sometimes, to watch the processions of the brides and grooms, then disappear out the garlanded door.
On Virginia Woolf
(Italics are quotations, taken from Virginia Woolf’s “An Unwritten Novel,” the subject of this piece.)
Virginia Woolf had an odd eccentric appearance that made people stare at her in the street. [1] [How quickly we make to read people! The human face holds more than a surfeit of mystery for us.] Her writing may have been her double – unsteady in its logic, bending the form of truth as fiction had known it before – square plots, shapely people, a scheduled time for tea then off off! to the next appointed activity in a sequential beginning-middle-end. No, in Virginia’s writing it is the Spring; and each word is a blossom in the mouth: The woods flit and fly – in summer there are bluebells; in the opening there, when Spring comes, primroses (115). In her own word, primroses – the beauty that is at once unmistakable but oh, so delicate! However can a petal fall if not by a phrase, so tragic, dropping some flickering note of despair? Well, my world’s done for! And there is the fall of an egg, the crack of a shell. What do I stand on? What do I know?… Who am I? Life’s bare as bone (121). Is it possible to give words to sorrow, the sorry thought of existence when we uncover how wrong we’ve been! – hardly it would seem, but Virginia crawls inside a hollow bone and lets the whiteness speak grief enough. Or if it is not the bone, then it may be the grey thread of a patchy glove, the green cardboard boxes of too many solemn rooms, the spot on the window of a passing train – the thousands of domesticities, aglow with meaning to a narrator drunk on the epiphany of gesture, the poetry of prose. Who could be such a fine interpreter of glance as she: such an expression of unhappiness on the poor woman’s face – and there is almost a symbol of human destiny with it (112)! The poor woman never knew such valor. And here is the beauty in it! When the forgotten or the squalid attain so much loveliness of words, what transformation ensues! – some indelible combination of the reproach of the world and the splendor of rhododendrons, a fling of red and white, for which [we] starve and strive (118). It is munificence most singular, the hum of a perfectly spun phrase. Surely Miss March – whose secret world we would never have known! – sees the truth in this. But why does the beauty of everyday things so often escape us? We do not find the meaning in them. Yet Virginia must and her characters may follow, with all the perception of a writerly writer’s creation of voice. And it is translated to us, but at first we think it is an inscrutable form – for what winding paths do these phrases traverse! Maybe this is the thing – so many hyphens, such tangled thought will give us pause. Meaning, deep and shining, is not at once clear to us. And if we have no recourse to meaning, what is there? Our ears linger on the cadence of phrase and we swallow, not without joy and not without fear, the thick and real beauty of white light [that] splutters and pours, plate-glass windows, chrysanthemums, milk carts at the door (121). The wor[l]d makes such poetry – and how! A bird squawks outside my window – and there is great sadness in it. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves (121). A place where the littlest thing is not too crude. There is ripeness in every thing; the flowers in our hair, unnoticed till now, scatter to the wind – by the shudder in our bones.
[1] Detail comes from online source: “Virginia Woolf’s Psychiatric History” (http://www.malcolmingram.com/vwframe.htm).
Playacting
A pigtailed girl sitting next to Dorothy May in the public library one Saturday afternoon was the nearest thing to an audience Dorothy May ever had. The girl was giving her a sidelong glance and making no effort to conceal it; and, leaning back very slightly, the girl asked Dorothy May in a loud voice why she was wringing her hands in that nervous way.
Dorothy May seemed startled for a moment but only looked up from her book after a lengthy pause. She turned her head toward the pigtails and blinked two times. Her mouth was small and nearly a straight line, except for how the lips curled up slightly at the part where they were thinnest. Her eyebrows were raised high into her forehead like arch-backed cats. Dorothy May blinked once more then returned her stare to the book on the table. She kept on wringing her hands.
The girl widened her eyes and wiped her nose, which was running badly, on her whitish sleeve. Wrapping her finger around one pigtail, she began twisting the hair in a coil. She looked at Dorothy May unabashedly for a minute, in silence. Then her mouth opened and she spoke again, rather more quietly than before: Miss, why you got so many knots in your hair? Don’t you got a brush?
Dorothy May exhaled from her nose and repeated the blinking of a minute prior. This time she did not lift her head from the book; instead, she held it perfectly still and if you cared to, you could balance a basketful of eggs on top. But of course no one did care to do this, or even think of such a thing, and the perfect stillness of the posture was lost on the girl, who by now had stuck a pigtail in her mouth and was holding it with her lips pressed tight.
The patrons of the library were pacing the aisles and twirling pencils between their fingers, or else sitting scattered at the rectangle tables, wheezing or chewing gum in front of newspapers and weekend magazines. At the far end of Dorothy May’s table, an old man wearing a bowler hat was leaned back in his chair, half asleep. Nearby at the front desk, the librarian was holding pince-nez glasses with one hand and dragging fingers down a record book with the other, mouthing words in all practiced noiselessness. Dorothy May, if a little unbrushed, looked like all the other people in the room in all the vaguest ways, except for the ever-present fact that she had the gaze of the pigtailed girl fastened securely upon her. Truth be told, the gaze gave her some small glamour, and you might almost think that Dorothy May smiled, as if aware, at the thought of it.
The girl did not speak again for a while. In the meantime, Dorothy May turned several pages in the book she was reading. By the turning of her pages and the biting of her lip, you could see she moved in the style of a bookish woman who reads a shade too fast. She did not mark passages with her finger or look up and stroke her chin – after all, her hands were still twisted together anxiously; she merely read on with her head quite still and her eyes blinking in an odd little regular rhythm.
Whatchoo reading? said the girl finally. Now Dorothy May quieted her hands and closed her eyes and smiled serenely, almost crazily. You thought she must be praying to Heaven. With her eyes still shut, she pushed the book a few inches toward the girl with careful fingertips and kept on smiling. The pigtailed girl started, then recovered, taking the book with something near reverence, and peering at its cover. A book of plays, miss? she said. Dorothy May dipped her chin almost imperceptibly and did not speak a word. She was still pressing her eyes tight together and wearing a mad grin and her silence could break a baby’s heart, almost. Then she pushed back her chair, all of a sudden, and opened wide her eyes and stood at the table. Her arms hung like boards at her sides with hands like paperweights tied to the ends, and in a dramatic gesture, Dorothy May, not glancing at the girl, strode away, past the old man in the bowler and the librarian in the record book and out the revolving glass door that took you to the street. They were the most gorgeous ten seconds of Dorothy May’s life, you thought. The man in the bowler hat gave a loud snore as the girl watched Dorothy May disappear from sight. Dorothy May walked and smiled and then you almost thought she had the look of someone who had just killed a man and was exiting stage left, meanwhile, just before the curtain dropped.
New Year
As the dusk turns morn
And carolers sing
Blessings to Earth,
All cradle their heads
Aslumber in beds
And hum a pleading
For peace.