Artwork © Ira Joel Haber
The Lupine Letters 3
Erasure poems from letters of Virginia Woolf
23 March 1927
I see so clearly a child go
over the precipice – her hands far more
beautiful than mine, like a hare’s bone
stuck about with emeralds cursed
by bluebottles in a hot room.
9 April 1927
Little girls touched me, little boys
sitting hoglike and brindled. Rome
is the city where I shall come to die.
7 February 1929
A perfect angel sits on the edge
of the bed like a judge. Huge
pineapples have shot into the square.
These things take time like
a policeman trying many bolts.
11 May 1929
How you seduced me by grasping hard
the mane of the typewriter. Your sex
muddied the pure pool of dulcimers.
8 June 1929
Does London exist? Here naked ladies’
legs are lost like needles. Everyone
is shameless. I like the atmosphere.
17 September 1929
What can I say about the truth?
All spangles like a Christmas tree;
never a glimpse of the mantelpiece.
15 August 1930
I see the circumference of the sofa,
sketched the pillows. I haven’t
warred with the world sufficiently.
Kai Jensen was born in Philadelphia, emigrated as a child to New Zealand, and now lives on the Far South Coast of New South Wales, Australia. His poems have appeared in most leading Australasian literary journals and, in the USA, in The Inquisitive Eater, Men Matters Online, New Verse News and Rattle.
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.