The Woman in the Hat

The woman in the hat
is a song of herself,
a Whitmanian triumph:
Coiling the room around her gaze,
she stops to listen
to the fragile exhale of wind
that tips the afternoon on its side
and pours the remaining light —
evenly at first,
then in splotchy, arhythmic bursts —
onto a sparsely planted, earthen canvas,
almost too dark to see now
but for the dim, moody glow
of domestic life.