Joanna Klink

PORCH SWING

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.

JOANNA KLINK is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Nightfields (Penguin, 2020). She has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Trust of Amy Lowell, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.