to the end of the journey
a free verse poem for Crucible: the stone womb of elderhood
“I love the idea that our houses might incorporate a threshold to the Otherworld; that the liminal hole in the side of an old Scandinavian house might actually be a portal to another world…” — Sharon Blackie, Hagitude
When I saw her long body
of Facebook posts splayed
with so much perfect joy
and freedom and pictures
of the new man half her age,
their travels to exotic places,
I thought I’d lost something.
Left it in the garden of limitless
belief, set it down on the altar
of marriage when I was twenty-one,
preening in potentiality, or stuffed
it in a junk drawer of excess things,
wrapped it in a sheath and hid it so
it wouldn’t cut my kids, or dropped it
while I was looking at the sky and fell
off the cliff onto the ground of reality.
I have been The Fool, the zero card
in a deck of many, sauntering around
town richly dressed, smoking and seeking
men twice my age to give…
