She wears Ophelia's dress
by Patti White


She wears Ophelia's dress
wrung out and hung to dry
on the frame of her shoulders.
Or what, perhaps, the creek saw
as it gazed up at a surface
broken, shattered by flesh,
the watery trees and golden herbs
floating around her like cloth
woven so fine as to be transparent.
Had Ophelia lived, she would someday
have owned a dress that, like this one,
appeared as a poetry of thread, a thin tapestry,
a field beneath a face, rosemary for remembrance.





x

Copyright © 2024 by Red River Review. First Rights Reserved. All other rights revert to the authors.
No work may be reproduced or republished without the express written consent of the author.