Jean Rhys

BY SANDRA LIM

It’s now within

an hour of sundown of a late
November afternoon.

It was a beautiful day,

the cold burned
down any indignation.

What won’t degrade:

the sick and distant, or near and black,
bad-natured tides of want.

Jean Rhys is saying

If  I could jump out of the window
one bang and I’d be out of  it.

It isn’t done
to admit to this kind
of  need,

but spirit needs a house,

and the brief pageant of  being
escorted through

the grieving joy of words

set down right. The cold bores her,
oppresses her. Life

comes to bore her. She can strip

a thing down. I want
beauty, she adds. Hear me?

I hear you, Jean. Yours is a voice

disabused; and inside the cold of  it,
there’s a sort of festival.