Heartbreak
       

In the card, the figure is alone
surrounded by broken cups

while behind her the goblets
brim and forth but she does not notice.

A river, a mountain, but flat and
inimical as though it would take her

decades to reach them. I swallowed your
name as if by hiding a word

I could escape the pain. Now
whenever I speak a tangle of frog-spawn

mixed with half-dead flowers—messy
decaying things, a bitterness

when I drink even the clearest water.
I loved the gamble—to stake

so much of myself on something like
a walk in the park–like the coming

of an ice storm when out of the blue
each tree turns to knife—glitter,

gloved in strangeness—the world a glassine
vivid, also solitary, a little desperate

like a women in a Greyhound station
begging money for a ticket anywhere.

I forgot that, as ice breaks, even the tautest
thread of desire can snap, just like that,

leaving one person holding the cut ends.
That figure with her spilled goblets. She should

bend over and pick them up, but this is art
where nothing happens—

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Copyright © 2021 Sheila Black All rights reserved
from South Carolina Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission