A Room of One’s Own
“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain.”
— Virginia Woolf
That I haven’t written, will not write
can’t mean I am not writing
about having written, about standing still
in the hereafter. I have, of course,
outlined the arguments, tried on
the opening gambit like a silk blouse.
Can’t mean I didn’t gather
a bouquet from my wild—
a sliver of wit, a peck of curiosity,
a crisp riposte, the curve of a dimple—
to offer you. “To have offered,” as in:
“to have had it be offered to (someone).”
I did try to be prepositional,
to stray near you.
I rehearsed the syntax—should I
first: apologize? confess? joke?
—a fern here, a lily there,
the subject here, the object there. Run
on I creased the sentences
into flightless origami; drafted monographs on silence—its juicy neurosis, its daft meter, my poor scansion. The predictable comparisons.Alphabetized my 12 memories; abridged the rest.
Check
and check.
By the next edit:
I would have drawn
the curtains against the fret
of your neck.
I could have shaded my eyes
from your laughter,
I will have pruned the light
branching on my skin where
you might have taken root;
I should have folded up the map
to my heres. Conditional
as they all were, anyway.
Yet I keep walking
into these stanzas—where you stay
baffling the rafters,
a rasp of feathers.
I nest into the floss
of those four hours,
story myself to sleep.
So, hi. As promised, I have moved
the furniture and flooded the room
with shade. My hands are now free
to file night further, further into day.
Sorry, sorry, on my way
to write you, the words left me
at a stoop. The one where, for e.g.:
“jasmine grows,” “is growing,” “will grow.”
In being so out of time, tenses
“have mattered,” “are mattering,”
“will.”