Er_s_ng Vi_gi_ia II, image by Daniel Y. Harris
excerpts from The
Voyage Out Sonnets*
35.
Laughter
grating dead silence, uncrumpling
from
the wall. Love was movement crowded
into
words of rhythmically stripping
nonsense.
Into the darkness, breath so dark it numbed.
Dreams
repeated chairs scattered
in a
square box vaguely twitching as if paper. Metallic
sleep
lit a cigarette impatiently. Lonely
minds
look at the ruins in the garden facing
sharply
cut spirits. Numbness disappeared, flung off.
Silence
cut down a tree, big and splendid.
People
are puzzled, pointing to smoking cigarettes.
Trees
flirt with eyes: nobler than conversation.
A pale
look shut up in heaps of sleep.
Fragmentary,
hazardous instinct.
46.
The
clock scratched the sky.
Snowy limbs
hum among firelight. Parasites
toss
colour about faces. Brains rock
the
sea. Stretched streets tie beasts
to each
other. Nightingales muddy red earth
blue.
Birds prick through smoke. Fingers fill the sea
with
dark ships. Silence was the only human being
at
risk. Love clasped the chilled
glass.
Hands pulling flowers dust half-shut
eyes
rung in the smoking room. Blood loathing
the
sound of eyes shutting. Figs listening
to
embroidered heat became annoyed by wrists.
Exercise
dropped digestion in front of the mirror.
The
dance demanded nonsense and heaps of flash.
47.
Dim
figures grace through the garden. Bent
eyelids
dress sleep in bright fog. Breathing confirmed
interest
in life. The world sat close to the bodies,
ceased
to be. Calm engaged the railway, determined to join
people
in the burden of the new generation. The mind dashed
legs
into movement. The flies are particularly nice.
Under
the nodded moonlight, tea flowed
with
silver marks of pepper. Gloomy people treat
frowns
as children. The eccentric was clear eyes and endurance,
playing
tennis. Minds had very few thoughts. Snug below October,
life
animated traces of fading eyes. Clouds smoked
the
mist of tobacco in intervals of sea water.
A cold
water signal sprung on the tennis court.
The
gravel seemed reluctant they should go.
48.
Breaking
exhausted creatures under bricks, the air
drooped
dry spines. The fall shapes could merely listen
in
spite of the heat. Heads, looking at each other’s hands broke
earth.
A heavy-eyed headache added
dark
windows. Painful movement shut the thump
in a
bed of ice. A song slipped through the heat. Glassy cool curling
tried
to obliterate the world of sound. Isolated
bodies
appeared drawn to the mist of the night.
Hollow
hands come nearer across sleep
and toe
the still hot shadow above. A tunnel
formed
in drops, whispering the lives of other people.
Music
plunged the room. A rose can’t roll
at the
same spot as a child. Anxiety visits in waves, unwilling
to sit
down. A high pulse slips out the day.
49.
Hours
pinned distance to grains of sand. Restless
nightmares
amounted to boredom shut up in a white house of paper ears.
A long
pause obeys the dark frown of shock suffered. Eyebrows shrugged,
leaving
behind colour shut
white
in ice and fresh milk. Days saddle
the
minutes to a train in nervous jerks. Oblivious eyes
grasp
sticky water rolling over dead light. Exhaustion paced
the
grey light and passed away. The waves beat trees into nothingness. Rustling
rose
the moon beneath one’s eyes and slipped down the pale, blue earth.
Glow-worms
fold tiny suffering into their bodies. The dark wave of pain
replaced
bare bone. A bird jerked the ceiling of its body round the room.
People
drifted in low tones, too restless to uncork the mind of morning.
Buried
alive, the afternoon struck the sun. The red hand of desire cut
the flesh
of silence. The souls ceased death while they spoke.
—Erik-John Fuhrer
*These
poems are from a longer work titled The Voyage Out Sonnets, a
page by page erasure of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. During the process of erasure, I moved
chapter by chapter and then formed what I had into 50
experimental sonnets. Solmaz Sharif has convincingly linked poetic erasure
to government censorship, which every erasure project certainly risks
replicating. Woolf herself had to censor herself in her novel in order to get
published. Since the intent of this project is to celebrate rather than censor,
I was careful and mindful not to redact but to highlight Woolf’s words. Rather
than physically blackening out words during my process, I left
Woolf’s original text clean and instead circled words that I believed revealed
the multiple possibilities in the original text. I highlighted language over
narrative and provided agency and voice to animals and inanimate objects, which
Virginia Woolf often does herself in her later work, such as “Kew Gardens.” For
the most part, I did not add anything to the text, with the exception of the
rare addition of an “s” at the end of a word. I also occasionally cobbled
together a word from individual letters. That said, Woolf's individual language
remains mostly intact and unadulterated in these poems, which intend to pay
homage to Woolf's original text.
