Nuance, at best, is difficult to parse out. Difficult, as in not impossible, but challenging.

Challenge notwithstanding, the driver of this poem expresses herself in solitary flights. She is known to flee.

At her very best, or is that the worst — the undisciplined — she charges into an unknown with little respect for the difficulty of the terrain until she is forced, by some creek too high to forge, to retreat.

Fear has a way of driving the stagecoach driver to return.

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The coach is held in place by four wheels and a team of horses — often two or more. There is form, language, and punctuation. She uses them all.

She is not the kind of driver to brake suddenly.

Rather, she rides the brake until the brake is worn by repeated wear.

The horses cannot understand, now that they have crossed the divide. Will the stagecoach driver forge ahead or return to the empty parlor where the sherry decanter has been stolen, or at the very least, smashed?

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She is the driver of a heedless coach. She is the quill, the wheel, the horse, the buckboard, and the calloused hands without gloves.

She is the running board. Dammit. She has words to deliver.

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Running is for cowards.

Creeks go high. Roads get pocked. Wheels buckle under the strain just as discarded cooking pots, feather beds, and grandfather clocks clutter the trail. Ink stains.

Battles are lost. The sun blazes.

The buck cannot help her. He died when she shot him.

She took.

He gave.

Together, they grieve the instability of their path.

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Nuance, a difficulty, and death, an inevitability. Poetry is a lost language.

Or should that read: Poetry is a language yet to be found.

If she travels to uncharted territories where her mind is free to wander — can the driver call herself a pilgrim in search of a destination with unlimited choice? Or is she simply a nomad, unsettled, yet undeterred?

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Nuance is the ground she trods upon. Sage. Brush. Her hair is tangled, but free.

This, she knows. And the parlor keeps.