Poetry: For R. by Lorna Wood

For R.

What do you give a son who died?
My friend let music pour in—
I’m guessing an early Mozart opera—
wit, charm, and feeling,
and he also died too soon.

She put the heartbreak at the center,
a spiral of cold blue stones
vanishing away, though you never 
can be sure—it’s also welling up.

Or maybe they’re not cold, not stones,
because all around is life—
flowers and curving petal shapes—
and the blue brightens,
and the orange behind the spiral
brings forth orange flowers and even,
in the center, towards the bottom,
a bloom of bright red, like blood—
until it’s all one glorious garden
where primordial sea-creature petals swim
among the open flowers.  

In the upper righthand corner, 
unexpectedly, a window opens, 
bordered with pink blossoms.
Inside, the background is blue, 
as if you’d caught a glimpse of heaven,
but there’s no revelation, just another
tangle of flowery forms.

My friend outlined all these intricacies
in gold pen, defining the mysteries
of his heart tangled with her heart,
of notes pouring in and love pouring out.

When this small picture
struggling to fill a void 
was finished, she gave it to me, 
her granddaughters’ violin teacher,
so it could hang in a room 
where children came to play music.

Bio: Lorna Wood is a violinist and writer in Auburn, Alabama. Her poetry is forthcoming in erbacce (featured writer, 2022 erbacce-prize), and has appeared in 2% Milk, Before I Turn Into Gold (David L O’Nan, editor), Angel Rust (Best of the Net nominee) and Poetry South (Pushcart nominee), among others. Her fiction has appeared in Doubleback Review (Pushcart nominee) and on the Litro [USA] Lab and NoSleep podcasts. Her creative nonfiction recently appeared in Feed, and her most recent scholarly essay is in The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism. Find out more at https://www.amazon.com/author/lornawood or from her blog, Word Music, here: https://lornawoodauthor.wordpress.com