form loosely based on Amy Lowell’s “Chalks: Black, Red and White” (1914)
The river is the color of tea, cedars leaching their tannins into its run. Still, it reflects the branches above it, a muddied pool of green and brown. The water striders script cursive on the surface, each new disturbance a congregation of calligraphy. They are speaking to the river in a language I cannot understand.
I watch a storm gather clouds
in the east, a storm they’ve named
Ophelia. I seek her shroud
in the stillness, her face framed
by water and leaves, but she eludes
me. It’s so quiet, I startle at first
when some men next door, crude
and loud, begin to curse,
reach for ropes to secure their boats.
The wind picks up speed and whips
the water to swirl. I grab my coat
and pull the edges closed, zip
it to the neck. The first rain falls.
I search for Ophelia’s watery caul.
The water striders’ letters are erased by the pelting of the rain. No one will know their message now. The river begins to rise. Safe inside a house that is not my own, I watch through windows dotted with drops as its edge creeps a little closer to the lawn, over the first rocks of the boat launch.
One tree blows, leaning over the river,
its leaves reflected in the transparent stream.
Inside, a blanket to muffle my shivers,
a cup of tea to sweeten my dreams.
Outside, Ophelia rages like a daughter
mad with grief. I know that feeling,
larded all with verse and sweet flowers,
but the blackest sort of thief, stealing
all comfort. They will never come again,
like a storm passes once through the sky,
follows and runs its course, depends
on currents and pressures that fly
unseen over my head. I think I catch
fragments of old hymns, unaware
of the danger I am in. I unlatch
the door and breathe in the wet air
like a creature that belongs in water.
I know what I am, but not what I might
be. Like Ophelia, I sought to slaughter
my sadness in flowers, in the night,
but it never worked. Now her namesake
storm rails against its own little griefs,
roars its lamentations, cracks and breaks
branches, shivers every needle and leaf.
I wonder where the fragile striders shelter in such weather. They weigh nothing, almost invisible, and this wind moves trees in its wake. The river has breached the barrier of the shore, crept over to puddle on the green lawn. I watch the radar colors stutter across the weather map, try to decipher how long until it passes. The rain keeps coming, the current of the river strong now. The storm outside, the storm inside, both forces that cannot be controlled.
Earlier this week, I paddled on this
same river, the current a trickle,
sun on my back, and reminisced
about younger days. The fickle
ways the mind, the body can betray.
I settled heavy into the seat
of the kayak, afraid of its sway,
matching the unsteady beats
of my swing between poor wretch
and happy innocent. Pansies
for my thoughts. Striders etched
their poems and their fancies
on rippled glass. Turtles spread
their armored backs on felled
logs, sunned their wrinkled heads,
my own thoughts adrift, withheld.
The rain eases, the insects floating for a while, melodious in the river’s muddy breath, heavy with its own drink. The river swells with high tide then recedes, leaving the grass sodden, the flagstones flooded. It’s not over yet, clouds spread out like garments on the water, the dull gray of drowning a pall over the afternoon. Ophelia in the sky. Ophelia in the water. Mourning mad Ophelia always in my heart.
But a storm is not a girl, and a girl is not a storm. A storm cannot grieve, but a grief can be a storm. Grief is both a girl and storm, all the flowers and the insects and leaves and wreaths of flowers torn apart and blown away. All the grief written on the water, buried on the riverbank, inside the head of a girl, the grief inside my head, crowned with crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and longpurples, lost into the water. They are gone, they are gone. And the rain still falls.
–
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (forthcoming, 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016), and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She hosts the monthly online reading series 100 Pitchers of Honey and is a co-founder/editor of the new journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.