Modernist Techniques
by Cam M. Roberts
Take that spatial and temporal plane
like Virginia Woolf’s glide,
and see it through to her delicate
wet death – Septimus still
in shell-shock, the footsteps heard
growing louder, coming, and closer,
up the stairs, summoning escape,
no proportion will heal those unseen wounds,
so he resolves to fly, and he goes –
Clarissa, the party is over,
and the flowers you decided to buy
all on your own are wilting in
the heat of the sun which bleeds
through your private window.
Also, Mrs. Ramsay:
The Lighthouse beckons you
Towards your ninth child at fifty
years of age – Bless you ma’am,
the water breaks, and your fate
is enduring under the eroding portrait
of sand. (Lily Briscoe puts her final
stroke on the canvas) – “I have
had my vision.” Something tells me
you’re finished; [Time Passes] –
Her note to Leonard was the final one –
Pockets packed with stone,
She calmly disassembles the soberest elucidation to ever
flicker through her mind, through even the deepest, starkest, most
inaccessible space that not even darkness could cling to –
And, she savored this particular inhalation where the smell of earth and sun
was like a last bite of some dignified delicacy, pure ebullient prewar fun,
and so then she releases her stream-of-consciousness to the zenith of eternity:
Alone.
Ubi sunt 