blue water, clear sky

I imagine a woman stumbling along a solitary trail,
the eastern horizon dark as glass,
overgrown branches beating at her like sharp, balled fists.
The pain at the back of her head like the moist insistent cliche':
a pounding, a drumming, a hammering with ice picks.
She is positively aching with righteousness and rage,
yet, already, the first few tendrils of regret have begun to emerge
like quiet assassins, like slim, venomous snakes.
She wonders what it was, exactly, that has made her so blindingly angry.
Her capacity for forgiveness? The idea of forgiveness itself?