Swizzle Stick

In An Ugly Manner

A wet & windy Sunday so I sit
under a crocheted rug, reading
Mrs Dalloway for the first
time. It's a book that has sat
for years on a shelf, awaiting
its moment, which is now. I find
its prose poetic, its post-war
characters, their inner lives,
foreign, familiar. I read,
lulled by stream-of-consciousness,
modernist style, till I am snared
by an adverb, at which I stare:

Food was pleasant, the sun was hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood . . .

Uglily, the word uglily, in
an ugly manner, its meaning
clear of course, but graceless,
hard to think & say. Death by table
knife indeed, uglily. I think of people,
of myself, crying uglily, speaking uglily.
I see a malformed lily at which
people say ug. An Ug-lily.
I google the word; it's real,
correct, accepted, but neglected,
in usage, maybe uglily. An aside -
an anagram, another unheard adverb:
gluily. In a gluey manner.


This plotless novella is precious
already. I am glad to read Virginia Woolf,
but I'm sorry that, for today, uglily
has salience, the word attached forever
to Virginia & Mrs Dalloway.



April 21—Salient image (poem based on one concrete thing you remember at day’s end) image:1392103}