"Ode to Sorrow" by Lucia Galloway

Ode to Sorrow

with a line from Ocean Vuong’s “Queen Under the Hill”

Sometimes pressing an insistent thumb
against a yielding surface brings water
welling up into the dented place, a little pond.
Sorrow is like this, a depression,
a basin of un-shed tears.

My own sorrow is a field, a turf
with folds and hollows that gather tears
in transitory pools reflecting a distant sky.

Many have found this field. One poet plays sonatas
on the ribs of a piano he discovered was a dead mare
shrouded in a tarp — its creases puddling rain.
Music fails, the poet gives in to weeping; the horse & I
a water-color hung too soon & dripping.

In Yosemite, I found a field as I walked barefoot
across a highland meadow. We visitors stepped gingerly
upon the turf as water pooled, cool around naked toes,
the fragile ecosystem of a recent pond
giving place to roots and stems.

Pond had become meadow,
meadow would become field — grassy, weathered,
inhabited by horses of a distant sky.

Note: The quoted lines appear in Ocean Vuong’s 2016 collection of poems, Night Sky with Exit Wounds.

Lucia galloway

Lucia Galloway’s new collection is Some Words for Meanwhile (FutureCycle Press, 2019). Other books are Venus and Other Losses (2010), The Garlic Peelers, winner of the Quill’s Edge Press chapbook competition (2015), and a chapbook Playing Outside (2005). Her work appears in Mid-American Review, Nimrod, and Tar River Poetry; online in MORIA, Inlandia, and Innisfree. Galloway lives in Claremont, where she enjoys singing in choral groups and co-hosts “Fourth Sundays,” a popular poetry reading series sponsored by the Friends of the Claremont Library.

Headshot: Judith Terzi

Photo Credit: George Gentry
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service