In my personal, self-absorbing despair,
it occurred to me, being a student of literature,
that I could look at the greats and see
what went wrong in their lives.
"Our sister's thrown from the back of a pickup into a grave.
Our grandmother loses her mind.
We are Chinese.
We are German.
We are American.
Our brother's in prison.
Our mother cries in a mental pavilion.
Virginia Woolf is homosexual and it drives her crazy enough
to kill herself.
This is what I think, but I'm in an altered state.
I enter a palace of pearls as my brother enters a banking
institution, both doors are made of water.
We are water.
We are deaf.
We are in prison.
We are mental patients.
We are liquid jewels.
We house the liquid jewels in our pockets and walk
into the river Ouse near Rodmell in Sussex,
perhaps because we cannot make love to anyone we want.
Virginia Woolf's mother dies when Virginia is 13.
Stella, her half-sister, dies two years later.
Leslie, her father, suffers and dies a slow death from cancer.
Her brother Toby dies when she's 24.
She has her first prolonged mental breakdown.
If instead of winter, summer followed autumn,
the journey of awakening would be a fantasy, as fantastic
as Woolf's transforming of Orlando
in a novel from a man in the Elizabethan court
to a woman of 1928.
The wilder the weather, the more ravens love it.
If instead of having an affair with Vita Sackville-West,
devoted wife to Harold Nicolson.
Virginia could have had her for a lifetime.
And had Leonard, her husband, and Harold, Vita's husband,
taken others in marriage, would Virginia have lived longer?
Happier?
If instead of rain and gloom, the English countryside
were warm, would she have been too frightened
to make love to a woman?
If the English countryside were brighter,
would she have had a woman forever?
The more conjecture in the wind, the more wind.
Let us never be too frightened to make love to anyone.
After her final attack of mental illness,
as scavengers had researched, and I repeat, please,
not to sensationalize, but rather to prevent anyone else
from nervous breakdown, Virginia Woolf
loads her pockets with stones and drowns herself
in the river Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28th just
before spring.
'We couldn't have gone on discussing the nature of beauty
in the abstract forever,' she writes in Moments of Being.
We are water.
We are alone.
We are a moment of being.
We are introspective and anxious.
We're mysterious and honest.
We are groans.
We are salty.
We are winter.
Blackwater."
"Midnight in England."