Unsent Love Letter to Virginia Woolf (a poem)

[Scrawled on the steps of 46 Gordon Square, London, England, April 2014]

 

Dearest Vergie,

 

It may please you to know

I took some time out of my busy itinerary today

to visit you in Bloomsbury.

I rang, but you must have missed the bell.

that’s okay, most of us won’t even have well-wishers

when we are dead, nobody to stop by

for afternoon tea.

 

It may not surprise you

that the neighbourhood is notable

for the sprawling University of London campus.

The house you lived in before you married,

where Vanessa lived just a few doors down from Keynes,

is mostly college classrooms

and there is a daycare

on the bottom floor of the Bell residence—

there is netting to protect their tender heads

from miscellaneous city debris,

and you have to lean in close

to hear them sing Itsy-Bitsy Spider.

Those kids know all the verses,

even ones I never learned,

or maybe they are making them up—

and when they are old enough to get drunk

they will stay up all night on Marchmont Street

debating God over pints,

then shuffle their sneakers to the stuffy classrooms

in the converted drawing rooms you once coveted

to study your stories, word by word

(one must be scientific, above all scientific).

 

Gordon Square is probably much like you remember it,

at least in geometrical terms.

The roads are all paved with asphalt concrete now,

and motorcar traffic passes at all hours.

All over London your flâneur tendencies may find pause;

the traffic is horrendous,

worse than you would ever know it,

the government has even imposed a price to pay

for driving in the City,

and people pay it anyway, for the convenience.

But Gordon Square

is a small patch of faraway nature

embedded in it all,

and there is the most charming photograph

of you and Stuckey sitting on a bench there.

 

Can’t say the same for Tavistock Square.

They could have done better.

I am sure it would make you laugh,

to see the metal bust in the southwest corner:

that aged lady with uneven skin, mouth drooping,

the nose aquiline

it looks like a small perch for pigeons.

But the signage assures me it is you—

and in the opposing corner of the square

the City did that patronizing thing

where they evoke the best of a man

with something better than the man:

Leonard has a ginko biloba tree planted there.

But if you saw it today

you would laugh again,

because it’s April and the daffodils around it

are starting to shrivel,

and it has been a hard winter and

the tree barely looks notable.

 

Tavistock Square is mundane, Vergie. Domestic.

Families take their children there to run in the grass,

and students go to make small talk

in circles by the statue of Gandhi.

It is a monumental square, in that

it is full of monuments.

Probably not the refuge you once knew it as.

All the old trees around the perimeter pathway

have been cut back to their trunks,

knuckled and knobby like deformed hands

pointing to the sky.

And like the old cemeteries I saw in Scotland

the lawn is peppered with white daises.

Yet, the square is closed, it has that feeling

of being a room of no one’s own.

 

It is a shame of what is has become, but

you would care no different, would you?

There is no purpose to preservation

for the artist;

even a urinal is a crucible

to the eye attuned.

 

I double-take.

Almost.

Almost thought I saw you there,

in that third floor window,

looking down on Tavistock

with that dream-weary stare of yours.

No—just the clouds’ reflection and my yearning imagination.

 

Anyway, I wanted to let you know I stopped by.

Don’t know when I will be back this way.

I took lots of photos, for good measure.

I wish you all the best, Vergie.

Just wished I had a chance to visit

before the water washed over your head.

I really do.

Maybe I would have called at just the right time.

I am told you are out in Rodmell,

under an elm tree in the garden.

Maybe that should be your skeleton

dangling by the blackboard in one of the classrooms

in Vanessa’s old drawing room.

 

Either way, I will write again.

You and I, we are doomed, aren’t we?

To write again and again and again.

 

So be it.

Until I can’t,

I will write again.

Until then,

all the best.

 

With love,

–Jack