The Widow Poem by MARINA GIPPS

Over rocks, over water, and shoreline air that blew
in a direction unknown to him yet given in one
fierce breath. Or maybe it was her ill imaginings—
how in one moment that crude day would comfort
her, alone and observationless, her house still standing
through the exhaustion of an air so thick the particles
would stick as she shook her head, 'no', or quite possibly
'yes'. It was difficult to make out the faint trace of her
skin, the sorrow of a core burnt through by this wind,
her husband—and where was he? If only the white sail
that was laid out earlier, a surrender upon departing
was visible as these lines deep lines, she felt, of travels on her
skin rubbed with a lamenting prediction. She would be
called paranoid if she walked the streets proclaiming,
He is dead, I fear no more, dressed in black so early,
only to be thought both victim and accomplice of a greater scheme.
Take this view of the storm, the one that wept for me
as it led me to bent stop signs—the air holding my blurry palm
like a deep magnifying glass.