Hours of searching
for treatments
and my hair is still
unmanageable
white and old,
my shape is still full
round and soft,
my eyes are heavy
swollen and dark;
my mind is a wandering
mass of curiosity
with no promise
to be kept by any maker
other than the one
that gave me this body
-what a funny god
who allows ruin to be as
inevitable as beauty is fleeting.
There’s an ocean a few feet away
and I can’t quite figure
the dimensions of waves
as they crash
and all the ways foam makes me tingle
but I like the patterns
that hover a moment
like snapshots before fading away
like when my children were small
but that was years ago now
which is strange
because I don’t feel different
until I see my reflection
which I can’t in the ocean
since it moves too swiftly
like time like children like waves.
The body I was in was called golden
with edges like driftwood,
smelling of caramel corn and sun,
looking like a shaggy butterfly
with a shaky wing.
I’ve stayed ragged
but processed and contained
like a koosh ball in a bubble gum machine.
My doctor had an old bag
and long beard. He was an impressionist
with a free-form modern sensibility
which made me feel like floating
in a murky pond
afraid of the depths, craving flight.
I sputter when I leave the hills, bits of
color left behind like a jet’s echo.
The shape of history
is a pile of love robed in stark beauty,
long grasses, and a touch of grief.
We become bakers or birds.
today is the future come loose,
a stripped gear in a billowing field
above or below (irrelevant)
with enough steam,
propelled to work faster yet darker
through tunnels made of spent youth
foraging on evolving ferns
abundant even in an apocalypse
laughter carried away on smoke
