She lands in the front lawn like a white, foaming sea wave— earnest, uninvited. She overtakes the porch, as if humidity herself. The porch is my chest where she sits heavy on a creaking rocking chair. Each movement strains the wooden joints; the rhythm she begins is anything but comforting. Hydrangeas line the drive, or did before she crushed half of the blueish clusters, too much for brittle stems, already drooping in their fullness at summer’s end. Once a lovely, balanced bed— seasons of loss and patience on public exhibition— trampled by the clumsy entrance of my Giantess. I’m not home and she knows it but somehow found me at the cottage; it’s the porch that is to blame, I’ll wager, wide and welcoming— screened in, too, but torn at nearly every seam so bugs are finding me delectable. You’ll break it I think to myself, all too aware of her size, her chair. Her dress, made of moth wings, impossibly gathered, spills out, carpeting the planks that make the floor. She spends too long unfolding, then refolding, rearranging— I see there’s fear in her fidgeting, I fear the wonder has all drained, right from her center— not like honey from a hive, not like rain that pools, to overflow a loosened gutter— but like raisins in the fixed, essential grip of a toddler’s fist— where chub, dirt, sweat, saliva mix with that one precious snack, until a new thing grabs their attention. Then, uncurling sticky digits, the old grapes fall uneaten, forgotten altogether. If they’d been seeds that fell, (maybe sunflower) a yellow kind of hope could have arisen here —which is simply untrue. The porch is grey entirely. Her hair is wiry, undone, and Sorrow’s overweight. I wait for her to speak, fixing my vision on barely-there-droplets-in-the-evening-air —the water cycle, visible but lacking beauty, as I once imagined it. How can I address her now, regal yet unbecoming? I begin with accusation.
*This is the 5th and final poem of my Sorrow series that I’m sharing here, for now.
*Today also marks the 20th poem I’ve shared on Substack. Thank you for reading and interacting with all these words. Here’s to the last week of Epiphanytide!
Oh, that pending unspoken accusation! This leaves so much in the future, so many possible turns. Exquisitely done.
What a rich, nuanced, sophisticated, contrapuntal personification