Joely Byron Fitch

Virginia Woolf’s First Novel Is Called The Voyage Out

Rachel dies at the end—
Sorry. Mostly it takes place
aboard a ship: they’re going
to America. How thin the walls

were between them I’m thinking
(the walls of the cabins, little rooms
at sea) as we’re balanced here
against ourselves           against

the edges of ourselves (trying
to leave our bodies through
our bodies)            wondering
if I can always hear

the neighbors’ baby crying
does that mean they also
can hear us or me making
these earnest worn-out sounds

(like the neighbors on the other
side of the wall of some other
poem—) (somehow in three
consecutive apartments always

a baby on the other side
of the wall) so here I’m both
the poet and the neighbor
and the woman in real time

enacting this gasp or moan,
some wordless affirmation—
alive and astonished at it,
at everything— pretending

we invented this— meanwhile this
barely-there plasticine
barrier is the only thing
between us (meaning me) and a possible

baby— a kind
of potential energy (so you
could calculate it; I forget
the formula)— and I

can’t remember the end
of the quote— how thin
the plastic— how thin
the walls— I’m thinking

intersubjectivity I’m
thinking, no, saying
yes         right there
please     I’m thinking

how tired language is I’m thinking
how nice to ever really
stop thinking and maybe—
for a second—  I do— then

a body              breathing
and how thin the walls
and I want to be alive
at the end of this book

even if it’s only
an attempt at something and I feel
so, yes, porous and I feel so
historical and I feel

like the end of the song,
like montage (that speeding-up)
like the light like the new
red buds on each spindly branch

of the tree outside,
blossoming, approaching
full bloom—which, yes, means Molly
too who’s maybe been here

all along since the yes
is that classic, breathless
yes (that no woman ever
actually wrote)

(In 1922 Woolf writes:
I dislike Ulysses more & more
that is think it more & more
unimportant) (She also

describes Joyce as ruined
by the danger of the damned
egotistical self) but I’ve
uttered this yes, lived in it—

(as in yes I’ve said it, yes
I’ve meant it, mean it
and yes I’ve read it,
written it, been written

by it even) and the word—
Woolf’s word—suddenly
retrievable from some
newly-unlocked mind-cabinet—

was never walls but partitions,
and her point was dreams
travel, are not singular,
can transfer, float among

interiors, fly straight through
the walls that separate us—
that people can be lifted
off the earth— lifted

to what? To see each other—
maybe, for a second,
rightly, maybe clearly,
maybe through to something

secret, hidden, something I want
to call true—meaning
what? Real? Then that pause.
What are you thinking?      and I

smile, kiss the thin skin
of his eyelid,
thinking the sea,
            the sky.

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Joely Byron Fitch was born in Ohio in 1993. She lives and writes in Moscow, ID, where she's an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho and the associate poetry editor for Fugue.