Ann Howells

Marietta, face wrinkled as a lizard,
shakes crumbs from her apron,
rinses hands beneath a village pump
that flows with troubled histories:

crumbled houses, tumbled walls,
foundations without architecture,
anonymous as bone. Her home
is a pentimento washed of amber

and saffron. Sun, cold as the moon,
abandons fiery orange; swaths of violet
mark where it vanished. Evening settles
like disembodied censure,

skin tinges indigo, and cloud purples
at the edges. Crows circle like smoke.
Cobbles grey overnight—a grim
and hoary frost. Hopelessness

lies in Marietta’s gaze:
Leave the dead to their graves…
No sorcerer’s abracadabra can restore
pleasure; the magnitude of anguish

humbles. She thought her husband
and sons invulnerable, invincible,
and in another place, another time
they might have died in bed. Here

all future is written in invisible ink.
The widow creeps, grey,
elusory as fog, has many stories
not to tell, many prayers

to offer a god in whom
she no longer believes. Vengeful
deities wager her fate. She, herself,
becomes a conquered country.