- You: a woman too old
- for passive contemplation
- caught staring out a window
- at bird-of-paradise spikes
- jewelled with rain, across an alley
- It's winter in this land
- of roses, roses sometimes
- the fog lies thicker around you than your past
- sometimes the Pacific radiance
- scours the air to lapis
- In this new world you feel
- backward along the hem of your whole life
- questioning every breath
- Nights you can watch the moon shed skin after skin
- over and over, alway a shape
- of imbalance except
- at birth and in the full
- You, still trying to learn
- how to live, what must be done
- thought in death you will be complete
- whatever you do
- But death is not the answer.
- On these flat green leaves
- light skates like a golden blade
- high in the dull-green pine
- sit two mushroom-colored doves
- afterglow overflows
- across the bungalow roof
- between the signs for the three-way stop
- over everything that is:
- the cotton pants stirring on the line, the
- empty Coke can by the fence
- onto the still unflowering
- mysterious acacia
- and a sudden chill takes the air
- .
- Backward you dream to a porch
- you stood on a year ago
- snow flying quick as thought
- sticking to your shoulder gone
- Blue shadows, ridged and fading
- on a snow-swept road
- the shortest day of the year
- Backward you dream to glare ice
- and ice-wet pussywillows
- to Riverside Drive, the wind
- cut loose from Hudson's Bay
- driving tatters into your face
- And back you come at last to that room
- without a view, where webs of frost
- blinded the panes at noon
- where already you had begun
- to make the visible world your conscience
- asking things: What can you tell me?
- what am I doing? what must I do?
- .