For Sylvia Marlowe Out of her left hand fled the stream, from her right the rain puckered the surface, drop by drop, the current splayed in a downward daze until it hit the waterfall, churned twigs and leaves, smashed foam over stone: from her fingers slid eddies, bubbles rose, the fugue heaved up against itself, against its own falling: digressed in curlicues under shadowed banks, around root tangles and beaver-gnawed sticks. She had the face of a pike, the thrusting lower jaw and silvered eye, pure drive. The form fulfilled itself through widowhood, her skin mottled with shingles, hands crooked, a pain I fled. Now that tempered tumult moves my time into her timing. Far beyond her dying, my tinnitus, I am still through the thrum of voices trying to hear.
Copyright © 2018 by Rosanna Warren. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 11, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.