Porch Swing
by Joanna Klink
And to have come this way for nothing. To see my own skin’s shallow glow against the cool wood of the porch swing, holding out my arms. The breezes I created leaning back into me. I was swinging against the empty day, against the rain’s copper pitch, against summer. Someone banged out piano scales and I swung against them, the lack of silence. I was a guest in that house, feathering shapes in my head out of snow, a quiet above the porch-boards emptying through meadows and rose windows. Sun fell like mist from an opening in the clouds above farmlands, the hills sometimes lifting like waves. I was host to disappointments that were not mine. I watched a few weeds glint in the woods, felt dry lilacs browning, was unseen minister to stray things that could resist blurring. Wet leaves against water. Glass bowls by the high windows. But now these are dreams, they are plain tombs.
Why such painstaking care in sitting on a swing — breathing, as if I could float back into the precision of myself within the white hours of afternoon, hung from clean beams by chains made stiff by rust. Their cold metal links turning warm in my palms. Have I not changed at all, folding my legs beneath me, bracing for the next unspoken need, the blind demand to stand and shoulder what I had no hand in creating. The sound of windchimes beaten gold.
Love is quiet. Something that is not love barrels over it. But I know who I am, I know that I live, I can touch what I’ve lost. The farmhouse is gone, the people who lived there have gone. When I trail a wrist through the air the air feels branched and altered, the soft wrens shatterproof. We could have tried to see one another as separate.
