In Her Sunroom – a poem by Ralph F. Matthews

In Her Sunroom

The recliner all but swallows her up now. 
Approaching from behind, I must
look from a certain angle to see if she is there.

Her lap cradles no Sunday paper,
no junk mail. Even her decrepit Bible 
sojourns on a nearby chair. She must be asleep.

Then I see her blue eyes 
gazing blankly ahead of her
through the window to the woods.

She sits as still as a column of cumulus clouds
in late summer. Her face has been practicing 
its look for the grave all day long. 

I imagine the den has a whiff 
of ether about it. I don’t dare breathe 
it in or light a candle against the coming dark. 

I can almost hear the scratch
of match against box, and then
an explosion of light 

that might take me, too.
But now all I see are the pilot lights 
of her eyes as they burn

through the woods behind the house,
across the black water beyond the woods,
to a place I cannot see from where I stand.





Ralph F. Matthews is a high school English teacher and poet living in Columbia, South Carolina, with his wife and three children. He has published poems in Visual Verse and Time of Singing.