Stepping Into Virginia Woolf’s Room, Briefly, Before Waking
by Roy Zhu
She was holding a glass, trembling slightly
—a peculiar feeling like goosebumps or autumn wind
sweeping across the back of my neck, the sensation of
the moon pressing upon me, light moving the page of reality
as if a book. Now I am in another space altogether,
a cold yet mystic sense of wonder beginning to move
through my heart. I feel as though a crystal, lit from within.
Everywhere and nowhere at once, a smoke passing
through the slithering annexes and crooks of streets.
I elide. There is joy in this wakeful dreaming. As well
as deep loss, which forms a feeling not unlike nostalgia
though deeper: a sort of grief mixed with bits of glowing
that can only be the feeling memory takes inside the body,
one of retrospective motion, as if I am touching the past,
back to witness a previous self and setting upon the hot
embers she could not pay attention to as she went
seamlessly, irreversibly past the scene of her descendant’s
attention. I am a vulture and an angel who picks clean
the ghost of my own body with the audacity and piousness
of a priest; I whisper words in my mouth as they condensate
like dew upon the cold window of my memory, alchemical,
turning glass into another world of its own. The globes
of water and the flat pane suddenly shake and quick—
there it is, a new dot of dew born suspended, born
with the full color of the world around it, as open
to everything as the glass is open to light, and yet just as
blind without the image the lens leaves behind. I touch
the window to try and to resolve this discrepancy, this flaw
that must somehow be equal to the human condition—
yet I am startled by myself. The wet reflection I make
returns me a face I do not recognize. Perhaps my body
is not one body. Perhaps the word is as given as it takes.
Am I free from the choice the vultures have made?
But before I know who must answer, the moon goes,
the sun pins stark the edges of this body and it is another
self who wakes.