In Spite of Falling, In Spite of Apart

How about I’m sorry, and the air here
all damp salt, palming every page of every book 
to limp and silk. How about the goldenrod’s

almost-gone, its flowers faded, grayed, 
but still clinging, still, up close, holding
the shape of a kindergartner’s crayoned sun, heavenly

and rayed and simple. Always, here, wind, and the way 
it simplifies—tea with no milk, the day
undecorated, though outside one house

a life-size plastic skeleton seems about to crawl 
through a lit window on the second floor. How 
about all the lit windows I’ve wondered

my gaze inside, longing for some particular 
yellow, some other life not mine. How about all 
the sorrys, the fox this morning dead by the road,

and how because I drive, it’s only luck it hasn’t 
yet been me smashing such radiance
to gone. This late in the season, the goldenrod’s

too far gone to make medicine, though I’ve read 
it does, when steeped in honey. Steep: as in 
those leaves unfurling in liquid; or as in road,

as in hill, and the hardness of hauling
any soft body up. And how about our bodies, bound 
together by the tiniest of particles, the clasp

of positive and negative keeping us from falling 
apart. Though we do, I do, as in that hazy 
heartbroken fallen-apart time when I could

eat only oatmeal, read very slowly and only one
book, a biography of Charlotte Brontë. How passionately 
she loved the married schoolmaster, who likely

did not love her back, and how she died
at 38, possibly of extreme morning sickness 
during her first pregnancy. These days I keep

coming back to flowers—not just the obvious
medicines, boneset and self-heal, but also 
hydrangeas, so common in yards, kindly

shifting their blooms from pink to blue when we 
slip pennies into their soil. Brontë’s schoolmaster 
never answered her letters, so there’s no telling

what, if anything, he felt. Sometimes, I can see 
the goodness in loving when I wasn’t
loved back, in spite of the falling, in spite

of apart. Or maybe because of just that. It’s hard 
sometimes to find the right words to say how things
connect—though toward the end, Brontë’s biographer writes,

she had begun to find some happiness. Looking up, 
just now: two layers of cloud: the closest thick-gray 
and racing, parting in windows to reveal

a higher-up blue traced with contrails and paler
thin-pulled cirrus—those clouds called mare’s tails, the ones 
that signal a change in weather.

Read more from Issue 18.2.