What kind of husband takes a vow of celibacy?
Yours was a smirking mess of a man,
a proper expatriate bound by decorum
and fettered by the existentialist’s tedious ego.
Virginia once called you a ‘bag of ferrets’
but surely your vitality and insanity
weren’t so far removed from her own.
(She was at the bottom of the Ouse
seeking her long rest six years before you.)
Confined to your own wasteland were you thinking
of Bertie’s hands on you or the years your
pen helped explain the 20th century?
How reduced is your life, after the pass of decades,
to be “his first wife”, a footnote in history?
What more could have been done to preserve your place
among the survivors and coddled, privileged addicts
of that traumatised generation?
You were more than a subplot in Tom’s Russian novel.
Those final, panicked nights — wandering London.
Alone, lost, wondering if the rumours were true:
(“Will you come back with me?”)
wondering if he had been beheaded.
(“Come back.”)
The chemists & fascists offered little relief.
You made encouraging signs to the orderlies
and swallowed the pills one by one
until the bottle was empty.
O, Digression! 