Of Sorrow: Breaking Across Us Now

by Katie Ford

I began to see things in parts again,

segments, a pen drawn against the skin

to show where to cut, lamppost through the stained glass

with its etchings of light against the wall —

it was the middle of the night. It was something we would tell no one:

The hospital roads with standing water, I drove quickly through,

saying, you won’t have to stay.

But then I left without you,

you whom I’ve felt missing all this time —

when I sat in the weeds of the yard, told to pull them

from the root, not to touch the wild trillium, tying knots in the daffodil stalks,

discontented. When I watched the scatters

of firs sway their birds out through my storm windows,

the tree itself now and no more,

I thought I needed belief — walking through the stubbed wheat grass

requesting everything that would undo me — the nearness of Christ,

abandon and devotion — no one has to teach me

my disobediences. No one sees

the shed I see now, its roof bent with snow, all of it

leaning south how it was never built.

The inches overcome it, but

the green wood darkens, oceanic and deep.

He might not wake up,

I thought that night —

I remembered the house I boarded in one summer

with a widower, his wife’s fabric samples left draped over

the arm of the unfinished chair. I could feel her eyes

in my own when I tried to choose

between them, almost, if the sun of the alcove

hadn’t faded them, the dust and his arms worn them.

The sky as stark as the first sheet laid down

after they took her body.

But on that night
while I waited, the clouds casketed the stars,
stars with no chambers or hollows, filling themselves
with their own heat how a hive quivers
to fill each crevice with itself,
how I have never been able.

National Poetry Month #17