Gouty
and Intolerable
Bernard went to Rome with a drop of
blood
splashed thin and dark a rounded
porcelain surface
Took a ship bound for Africa and saw
He’d never get there
Touch such foreign soil - the seat
of the Empire, as far as he’ll go
Neville in his room with the fire,
his lovers
A room full of books was he a
professor at Cambridge? Oxford? Did his literary
criticisms fill the stacks at The British Library?
Gouty and intolerable he said...when
we are both famous...are we?
By
that scene
There is a single point in time when
it all makes sense
Watching a boat drift soundlessly,
the buzz of a fly, sunlight glinting off the surface of a puddle — a moth
The most amazing thing in the world
The raw rash of youth, judgements
made of hopes that have been dashed
crumbled — tossed
Held us back all along
When we are both famous...gouty and
intolerable
One day you wake up and your hands
shake, swollen and misshapen
And it seems so far away making tea
like Byron (and not like him) and then one day you are
—Old enough to see the surface of
your skin, feel the water rushing and wonder how was it that you were ever so
stupid?
What we wanted, what never could be,
we see it so clearly when it's too late
Convert to Zen Buddhism and hope
you can accomplish in the next life what you couldn’t in this one
But then you sit or stand, some
lying prostrate, one final time
There’s always a last moment, there
has to be
Some of us are just lucky enough to
witness it
Sit and perceive like the surface of
the sea
Gouty and intolerable
“...and if you are dead I shall weep”
Virginia
Woolf: Volatile Woman
I shall go mad they said
And so we did
King Edward in the bushes
Why Edward and not Victoria?
She made the high fashions,
monarchical rule that’s really
What
they were rebelling against
The way she screamed for her husband
The Royal Albert Hall must have
radiated such heat
Who are we talking about now?
They fought me forced food down the
dark cave of a mouth
A hollow hole
The surface of a snake back to the
apple
I won’t eat
Only voices
Cry
out in other ways this is madness, madness
You put the kettle on, drip, drip,
dripping
Polite like mother in her drawing
room sip-sipping
Father in the library painting the
books
a mass of ordinary colors
Disguised we don’t see the quiet
darkness of Victoria
She only wore black once Albert went
We wanted light
She sat still typesetting
Against the ocean
Such waves! Pull-pulling
Can’t come back from that
The way the ocean finds her
Victoria would not leave the palace
When
they lowered old Bertie into the ground
Scattered
We were lucky
To be grateful
It was a river and not an ocean
And left a body
London
Stitches scathe the side of her
face, a trench in Trafalgar
Just walking the streets and sixty,
seventy years later we remember that there were Nazis
The war, the war, but it’s always
the war when will Europe be over this bloody
War?
Buildings shocked of shells
beckoning back Normandy
They’re just not there
Not worn crumbling compacting
concrete
A city should age gracefully
It’s how new it is, that’s the
warpath
Bomb after bomb pummeled every night
I thought England was the land of
castles
They put it back together shiny, big
box store here, a chain pub there
Virginia’s house is a hotel now
You can stay and stare out at a
statue of her for 150 Quid a night
I remember going there to see where
she came from and there was just an
inscription, one of those blue signs, the ones they have
everywhere like it was just another place
A statue of her head sits in the
park
So Mrs. Dalloway can walk through
town buying flowers herself
The British sure do know how to get
things done
Kept the Nazis back in six
instalments
Cold beans for breakfast and
half-naked meat pies
Across from the National Gallery
where her sister’s portraits hang
Suspended
ghosts of another century
“Only eat the Indian food,” they
said. “Everything else is shit in London.”
Ah the spoils of wars
Or
conquering
How many died during patrician?
And what, what did we see at the West
End again? I think it was Orwell.
How come I didn’t recognize the
actor from Downtown Abbey?
Must not have known him yet time
works that way
Around and around a war another war
and other conquerings
until
we can’t breathe down here anymore
But at least there’s still
cobblestone
And wrought iron gates
Virginia would have wanted that
The way her house gleamed all white,
the plaque said herself, her father, her sister
right there on the wall I wonder if
they rent this place out
Walking Regents and Bond, up toward
Kensington Gardens, Kings Street, The
Royal
Albert Hall and all that
Not a brick over 1950
Who knew newness could be so scary
So
ugly
They want you to think they’re okay
Patched up all nice and smug, scars
stolen a modern modesty
Under that brand new brick surface
There are castles near the
Superstore
You Have Been Reading Byron
You have been
reading Byron
Climbed the
spring of Castalia sprung oracles at Delphi
and thought this
is how words are made
In place of
worship – song
You have been
reading Byron
Who won modern cities in Africa took
them like sugarcane in moldy fingers
I looked him up
on Wikipedia
The whole New
Criticism theory
Affectations
there was an article in The New Yorker
Bernard would
have read The New Yorker
Neville wouldn’t
touch the stuff
Maybe he would
have contributed
But that’s always
the rub
Civilization
might eat itself When
we’ve seen such decanance
You have been
reading Byron
Who thought he
was a Jew
Harrod this and
Hebrew that
And didn’t he
read
Wilde professing
Saint John and Salome
I bet she was
beautiful
The way she danced –
Why do they
always blame the woman
When they lop off heads to carry on
platters?
You Have Been Reading Byron
You have been
reading Byron
Joined the Greek
War for Independence
Someone else’s
fight
The sticking of noses and the
Don’t belong
It’s a way out – the bane of
colonialism
Or is that capitalism?
The British are
always somewhere
Spent all that
time in Italy
Died at
thirty-six
I’m thirty-six or
I was when I started this
Still don’t know
what is more
To write poetry
Live in worlds, diving
down so deep, one, two, three, six, one hundred lives all
Reeling lost together until you just
can’t find them
Out
To be home in
southern Europe at a time
When it might
have been the end of the world
We always believe
the world is ending
Each batch of
kids convinced they’re the very last ones
Nothing follows
How could it?
We’re so special
When did it get
so small?
You Have Been Reading Byron
You have been
reading Byron
Saw him bathe in
green Greek springs
“And made a
bumbling idiot of himself.”
As only white man
can
Someone in grad
school said that
But bumbling
idiots don’t die at thirty-six
Bumbling idiots
live forever
Voting the deaths
of children
And their children’s children
The Last
Generation
Someday, some
generation really will be it
They won’t be
proud
--- It won’t make
them happy
You have been
reading Byron
I might have
known you
Have been you,
Byron, Dostoyevsky, Meredith’s young man
Another of the
thousand lives
An ancient world
where artists are a thousand years old
The Fool Falls From Somewhere Else
“It is to this we
are attached. It is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we
have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising the fissures.”
Rhoda (pg. 64)
To the sea we are
held tight with leather cuffs
Left twisting submission to the body
of eternity
The frothy, milky
foam
attaches to our
skin, crawled out of it like turtles to the sea
Sought back to
things familiar
No- the waves
pushed us out
When we couldn’t
see and had no eyes
I remember the
summer I first saw the ocean
And I was sad
to learn it
wasn’t blue
But stood an
arrested gray
To our
outstretched fingertips
And the days that
have passed
Life will not
bind me to its blue surface
And other
crevices, other devices, in my ears, cling to my back and wail in the
distance
In the end (65)
the present moment- an emerging monster to whom we are
bound
tightly
The fool steps
off a cliff and they laugh
Point and leer
and wonder where he’s going
It’s eons later,
the primordial time of eternity that they realize
He was the only one worth saving
Jessica Stilling - The
poems, Gouty and Intolerable, Virginia Woolf- Volatile Woman, London, You
Have Been Reading Byron, The Fool Falls From Somewhere Else and Hampton Court
come from a collection she is working on. This collection takes a look at Woolf's
novel The Waves and tries to make sense of it through a hybrid of poetry, flash
fiction, and short personal essays - but mostly poetry.
She has published two literary novels Betwixt and Between (Ig) and The Beekeeper's
Daughter (Bedazzled) and her next literary novel, The Weary God of Ancient
Travelers (DX Varos) will be published this summer. She has also published some
young adult fantasy novels under the pen name JM Stephen. Her poetry has been
published in The New Reader Review, Caustic Frolic, China Grove Review and
Bridge Eight. She has published creative nonfiction in Ms. Magazine, Bust
Magazine and Tor.com. Jessica has done a lot of writing about writing for the
blog Bookfox and The Writer Magazine and sits on the editorial board of The
Global City Press, a small press out of City College of The City University of
New York. She has taught Creative Writing at The City University of New York,
The State University of New York, The Gotham Writers Workshop and The New
School.
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