The Only World She Knows*
Alone is a word that rolls on the tongue,
chokes the throat; it is beyond solitude,
for it offers no choices. It is a landscape
barren and bleak, gone brown
with the last of the hay,
winter soon to come. Here she sits,
crippled, hair disheveled, one hand
clawing upward toward the house
on the top of the treeless hill.
There is no sound but the wind,
the whir of grasshoppers.
Gray as the empty sky, the house
with its open door calls her in.
Ladders lean against the roof.
She knows each room, the barn,
the clothes line, the world
from her window.
All is clean, scoured with light.
In the night, boards creak,
clapboards ring with cold.
Day and night her bones ache
with a nameless desire.
Based on Christina's World, a painting by Andrew Wythe
Sue Scalf
|