Seeing the Far Woman

Mary Simmons

The far woman waves from tall grasses waving, too, as to swallow her whole, bone and flesh and eyes blotted sunspots.

She calls in names I have yet to claim for myself, her voice salt in my ears. With every step to her, I forget I hold that dying animal, hunched between ribs. She beckons over the space I do not fill. I find in her the meeting place, our two selves flooding water balanced still, horizon and dish, shallow with reflection. In winter, I see her between shadow trees, flickering beyond any hope of warmth. She withers in cinemascope, frame by frame undrawn and redrawn and stretched into— what? The far woman sits behind every window of the four a.m. train stalled in a corn field, does not wait at the top of any staircase.

If I reach for her, if I try to capture the curve of her open-eyed longing, I will only find the imitations, repetitions folded into smooth linen. Is this absence all I can hold of her? She remains, shapeshifter erasing shapes.