Of Virginia Woolf

You filled your pockets with stones,

a seed-sower sowing nothing,

nothing to cast away.

It must have been cold as you went down.

The bite of March water

must have brought blood

rushing in panic to your skin.

A gasp, perhaps,

as your chest submerged.

(Were you beyond gasping?

Were you so far behind the veil?)

And then the silence.

The hiss of water against the ears,

the stirred up mud against your startled eyes.

The water cold in your palms

and cold in your unravelling hair

and cold through your clothes

to your naked skin. And

the weight inside would hold you,

stronger than stones.

You stood, perhaps, for a time,

a naiad in the depths,

hair taken with the flow

until you sank full-faced and weary

into the soft silt bed.

Hung

By night I climb the scaffold.

Step, step, metallic uncertainty,

the slip-threat hanging, torch swaying,

an angler-fish bait hovering in the thickened air.

Its pool hits grass and rough-stoned walls.

Its pool hits slate, each square a sheaf pressed hard by time,

layering the roof, book-like, each a story in itself.

By night I settle my back on planks elevated

to greatness, a lifeboat up high,

mortar dust skimming my clothes.

Cold pins me down, bone-deep, empty.

I settle and stare, plunging deep to the world above,

the night sky a pool, a clarity hanging still,

a vertigo waiting to happen. Each star

a point of magnitude too great, too small,

to be believed. Each star caught, still,

a point in a scatter of billions, billions

of miles between us, too profound

to be likened to mundane things.

Ice-cold, they seem, remote and frozen

but each a maelstrom in itself, watching,

glitter-eyed, white-hot.

I think that making love in this

cold thin air, high up, pressed by stars,

pressed by scaffold boards powdered with mortar,

would be an explosive thing. It would

be a tumbling on the edge, quick, cold,

vital, once-in-a-lifetime. Impossible.