The Woman at the Window

by A. Diao Lavina

Summer was that night beside the dying river

and at its mouth the swollen moon

a broken shape on the waves, like a stray sunflower

or a plate hurled in naked anger by a woman

whose life tilts on dreams grown pale

and the daily muttering of household things.

It was then we spoke of secret things,

of nameless love they dubbed The River,

of wakening young from a closet, pale,

of frequent nights we longed for an absent moon

and that stunning day she became a woman,

her eyes to claim the yielding sunflower.

One Saturday I sent you a sunflower

and bought the florist's silence. Flowers are things

a woman does not usually send to another woman;

at least the note shouldn't read, Take me to the river.

I want to wade in the water and touch the moon.

Think how our mother's faces would pale.

Our letters trickled. In the box the old ones pale,

the words like falling petals of a dying sunflower.

One by one their meanings fade with each moon.

It wasn't inevitable, the way we neglect things.

You can't build silence like you'd dam a river.

To say the least, it's intricate work being a woman

who wanders into the riddle of another woman.

There are days when the choice defeats, and pale,

you slice your hair and fling its pieces into the river.

We cannot hold each other. We learn from the sunflower

that love and death are the wisdom in ordinary things

and in our clinging we only lose a changing moon.

"Some nights," I write to you, "I know the moon

hides her face in the clouds like a shy woman."

I let it rest between the words. I return to things

simpler to say in metaphors feeble and pale,

"Today someone sent me a boxed sunflower.

After the rains I may again visit the waiting river."

The rising moon will shiver and sent its pale

light to the woman who sings like a sunflower

her song of silent things to the bleeding river.