I saw her scar today,
a prideful star basking in its curtain raising.
(Her black blouse had slipped too low.)
I knew about the cancer, she had told me.
I don’t know why I am surprised by that flash of flesh,
that red reminder of…everything!
I am not a mother. I have no mother.
I don’t want to stay here.
My interpretation of everything, tired refrain.
Copper-coated copter flies with intention.
He knows just where he is headed,
no energy-bleeding, hope-wasting hither and thither.
His aim is there—
that slit of space formed by the incomplete union of two elderly deck planks.
The tiny-waisted tiny being glides inside.
Blackness welcomes him home.
Safe, safe, safe.
Rest! rest! rest!
(I know I am Nobody’s poet—And still!)
God, I want to be that wasp.
I am the spoiler who loves a rainy day. And yet, I find myself wearied by this February grey. A Miss Havisham grey, wasting and unforgiving, a punitive grey intent upon freezing time so as to preserve pain.
While I sit, hypnotized by outside gloom (introspecting, yet outside of Presence), a teacher appears. Eleven buds materialize on a single orchid stem in my office.
