Sandy Solomon: Metaphoric

Like leaves to sun, people in the room turned

toward her when she appeared at the door—

plain as metaphor—beaming. Happiness

flows, Tsvetaeva wrote, from the happy 

man. It used to flow from me. They leaned

her way eager for relief. She saw on strange,

tired faces her brilliances reflected.

.

My loneliness, she wrote. Washing up,

water and tears. What flowed then was around

and from, like washing up on a beached, drowned—

plain as metaphor. She stands, hands

sunk in cooling water and suds, curl

of glass between finger and thumb, and remembers

a self in which happiness once just was. 

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Copyright 2023 Sandy Solomon

Sandy Solomon’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Vanderbilt.

Beech leaves (photo: Richard Osbourne)