UNDONE by Sue Goyette

UNDONE
By Sue Goyette

In this weather, wood has warped and doors
won't shut the way they should.  The mist holds daylight

close, hoarding.  When it escapes, the light doesn't
spill, doesn't slide cross the floor, but creeps

and hobbles using furniture to hold itself up.  It just wants
to sit.  In this weather, light has age, grows rings like a stump

and can no longer hear.  It's the ancient relative in the corner
with a change purse and a group of grandchildren at its feet.

Extension wires, 100 watt bulbs, nothing helps.  It's faint
and weak and drinks only water.  In this weather, not even

the high tide of starlings rolling onto the lawn gets its attention.
"Leave me alone," it says, having forgotten the way it ranted

and raved.  How it demanded more time and more flowers.
The garden couldn't keep up, it touched everything:

the silver sugar bowl, the glass fish, every mirror, every drop of water.
And so begins the season of forgiveness, when the birch trees

bordering the yard turn back to bark and branch and you're alone
and I'm alone, the pantry is stocked

and winter is coming up the driveway.

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I'm undone and don't know how to put me back together.  This painful (physical, emotional, spiritual) ageing is the hardest thing I've ever done.  My body betrays me every single minute of every hour of every day.  Then it betrays me some more. What is a woman without the essence of what makes her female?  Why do we run out of hormones and become dried up shells of our selves when we're still so young?  We're dying, of course...but...but...Winter comes too soon, too soon...

xo,
Marion


"The great secret that all people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion." ~Doris Lessing

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When I can look Life in the eyes,
grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
and taken in exchange — my youth.  ~Sara Teasdale

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Late October by Dorianne Laux

Red leaves in the Louisiana Swamp

I am this woman, have been this woman, will probably always be this woman...

Late October
By Dorianne Laux

Midnight.  The cats under the open window,
their guttural, territorial yowls.

Crouched in the neighbor's driveway with a broom,
I jab at them with the bristle end,

chasing their raised tails as they scramble
from bush to bush, intent on killing each other.

I shout and kick until they finally
give it up; one shimmies beneath the fence,

the other under a car.  I stand in my underwear
in the trembling quiet, remembering my dream.

Something had been stolen from me, valueless
and irreplaceable.  Grease and grass blades

were stuck to the bottoms of my feet.
I was shaking and sweating.  I had wanted

to kill them.  The moon was a white dinner plate
broken exactly in half.  I saw myself as I was:

forty-one years old, standing on a slab
of cold concrete, a broom handle slipping

from my hands, my breasts bare, my hair
on end, afraid of what I might do next.

From:  "What We Carry", page 11

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Nothing [everything] left to say, the poem says it all.  xo