In the room of my girlhood I turned and turned. Every
where and way was a door. Another.
Only later could I see the curse of it.
The iron of my own feet thudding
from threshold to threshold.
There’s no way I could explain to her, the girl
I was, how simply stopping became a victory.
How standing in your own stillness after every aching
entry feels more like a welcome than any
arms opened by the fever of someone else’s dream.
You see it was always and never so easy. A histamine
reaction, the stench of sulfur stuck
to a landscape and its trees. Even should I suffer
to pretend myself a mother of ghosts in a world
pale as memory, floating. My body flushed.
And now that hush I hated
shores up against my chest a symphony, a silence
I love for being mine because so few things have
been, so little of light and morning and bedsheets,
the tremors fear threads though my spine.
To live long means to live alone, and to live alone
means to live as one. As whole. As all
evening the long lawn shook from the cicadas
the ever and more of their song. Their want.
Their way of showing that to lie dormant doesn’t always
mean dying. That sometimes dying means waking
again and with a new throat full of song.