Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in multiple venues including Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Curlew, The Ink Pantry, A New Ulster, Down in the Dirt, the PLJ, and Mad Swirl.

The Poetry of Virginia Woolf:

Words Robed in Beauty from The Waves

-II- Pebbles

Illumination



Let me talk.

The bubbles are rising 

like the silver bubbles from the floor of a saucepan,

image on top of image.



I have little aptitude for reflection.

I require the concrete in everything.

A good phrase seems to me to have an independent existence,

yet the best are made in solitude.

They require some final refrigeration 

which I cannot give them,

dabbling always in warm soluble words.



Louis, glancing, tripping 

with the high step of a disdainful crane, 

picks up words as if in sugar tongs.



I am a natural coiner of words,

a blower of bubbles 

through one thing and another.

But soliloquies in back streets soon pall,

I need an audience.

That is my downfall.

I make my phrase and run off with it 

to some furnished room

where it will be lit by dozens of candles.

I need eyes on me 

to draw out these frills and furbelows. 

To be myself I need the illumination 

of other people’s eyes, and therefore 

I cannot be entirely sure what is my self.



The authentics, like Louis, like Rhoda,

exist most completely in solitude.

They resent illumination, reduplication.

They toss their pictures once painted 

face downward on the field.

I wish after this somnolence 

to sparkle many-faceted 

under the light of my friends’ faces.

I have been traversing the sunless territory 

of non-identity.

A strange land.

I think of people to whom I could say things. 

With them, I am many-sided.

They retrieve me from darkness.

I see Louis, stone-carved, scuplturesque;

Neville, scissor-cutting, exact;

Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal;

Jinny dancing like a flame, 

febrile, hot, over dry earth;

and Rhoda the nymph of the fountain 

always wet.

These are fantastic pictures,

these visions of friends in absence,

grotesque, dropsical, vanishing 

at the first touch of the toe of a real boot.



Lustre



Let me dip again and bring up in my spoon

another of these objects we call characters of our friends.

His being seemed conglobulated in his brow,

his lips were pressed;

his eyes were fixed,

but suddenly flashed with laughter.

Prim, suspicious,

lifting his feet like a crane,

there was yet a legend that he had smashed a door

with his naked fist.

but his peak was too bare,

too stony for that kind of mist 

to cling to it.

But look – his eye turns white

as he lies in the palm of my hand.

Suddenly the sense of what people are leaves one.

I return Louis to the pool

where he will acquire lustre.



Byron



The tree alone resisted our eternal flux

for I changed and changed,

was Hamlet, 

was Shelley,

was the hero whose name I now forget,

of a novel by Dostoevsky,

was for a whole term, incredibly Napoleon;

but was Byron chiefly.

For many weeks at a time

it was my part to stride into rooms

and fling gloves and coat

on the back of chairs,

scowling lightly.

I was always going to the bookcase

for another sip of the divine specific. 

Therefore, I let fly my tremendous battery 

of phrases upon somebody 

quite inappropriate –

a girl now married, 

now buried.

Every book, 

every window-seat 

was littered 

with the sheets of unfinished letters

to the woman who made me Byron.

For it is difficult to finish a letter 

in somebody else’s style.



Humiliation



Neville has shot like an arrow from the room. 

He has left me his poem. 

O friendship, 

I too will press flowers between the pages 

of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Like a long wave,

like a roll of heavy waters,

he went over me,

his devastating presence –

dragging me open, 

laying bare the pebbles 

on the shore of my soul.

It was humiliating;

I was turned to small stones.

All semblances were rolled up.

“You are not Byron;

you are your self.”

To be contracted by another person

into a single being – 

how strange.



Stories



Yet like children, we tell each other stories,

and to decorate them 

we make up these ridiculous, 

flamboyant, beautiful phrases.

How tired I am of stories.

How tired I am of phrases 

that come down beautifully

with all their feet on the ground!

Also, how I distrust neat designs 

of life that are drawn 

upon half-sheets of notepaper.

I begin to long for some little language 

such as lovers use,

broken words,

inarticulate words,

like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.



But which is the true story?

That I do not know.

Hence, I keep my phrases hung 

like clothes in a cupboard,

waiting for someone to wear them.



Silence



Drop by drop,

it forms on the roof of the mind

and falls into pools beneath.

For ever alone, alone, alone

hear silence fall

and sweep its rings

to the farthest edges.

Gorged and replete,

solid with middle-aged content,

I, whom loneliness destroys,

let silence fall,

drop by drop.

But now silence falling pits my face,

wastes my nose

like a snowman stood out in the rain.

As silence falls, I am dissolved utterly 

and become featureless 

and scarcely to be distinguished from another. 

It does not matter.

What matters?



I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble

flicked off accidentally 

from the face of the sun

and that there is no life anywhere 

in the abysses of space.



White Spray



Should this be the end of the story?

a kind of sigh?

a last ripple of the wave?

a trickle of water to some gutter

where, burbling, it dies away?

It is strange how force ebbs away

and away into some dry creek.

Sitting alone, it seems we are spent;

Our waters can only just surround 

feebly that spike of sea-holly.

We cannot reach that further pebble

so as to wet it.

It is over,

we are ended.

But wait, an impulse again runs

through us;

we rise,

we toss back a mane of white spray;

we pound on the shore;

we are not to be confined.