Direction


I was a little girl
once, sitting on the rim of a huge stone bowl,
watching tiny distant figures love
and kill and hate one another.
                                              Two millennia
later I stood and looked the other way,
leaned against the iron railing and thought I knew
almost everything, like what love is
and how to consider marriage, how to
think about the present turning
into the future, how that might not be
so bad.
           On good days, when the good
is a little more than hypothetical,
I realize like a soggy leaf kicked over,
brilliant red: I am an artist. I send myself
into times and plays, to be struck dead
in my tantrums, to be mad.
                                          I'm a million times
amazed, the way we rebuild
the pieces of ourselves we lose, add metal pins
to our ankles and superfluous ones, spares,
to our ears. The way we speak of hearts,
make our losses concrete to feel them
more.
         On the radio, one voice sings of I and you,
the other: love. I stop my actors.
Back up, go again,
                              make it different this time.


(november 2006)