She is waiting for the end
of another beginning, woman,
always changing:
now the heat is in the core.
She is waiting for the end
of another beginning, woman,
always changing:
now the heat is in the core.
She is saying goodbye
to the moon’s pull, rhythm of tides;
letting go of consequence, tomorrow.
The calendar abandons its dialectic.
Memory constitutes a history.
She is cleaned out of hormones,
and will not replace them
because the letting go is part of the story.
If her bones thin, she will become a bird, take flight,
hollow bones, made part of the story.
Her unborn speak to her in dreams
whispering their would-have-been lives.
Possibilities dress in white:
the gossamer of last chance.
She walks in a desert of red sand
seeking water or blood. There is a train coming
& she will be on it, meeting herself.
A queen, crowned with the accomplishment of endings,
she is alive in the echoes of what is not alive
while every day loops on to the next.
The men she knows are running away from their lives
but her man stays, listens to her sizzle.
They are growing old, growing into themselves.
At last, a destination.
The intimate conversation with the past
happens after the children, in their other cities,
have hung up the phone. History
is in the woof & tweet of their days,
a music of remembrance.
Spring unfurls in the birdsong morning.
She stays in bed, remembering her seasons.
The fields lie cut, fallow.
