Imagine a string of beads
rosary or necklace
beads of pearl or sandalwood or jade
and then be one of them a while
and take your ease,
sleep even, safe in continuity.

It’s the kind of advice
the mirror gives
when you wake too early,
sun still tangled in the trees
or is it raining.

Be kind to yourself
is what it’s trying to say
but neither it nor you
know how. Guesswork abounds.
Take a walk, a drink, a week off.
The smile is always ready to come back.

Think about the skin on your back,
how little you know it
how sensitive it is,
a feather will fuss it;
this combination in you
(in me) of ignorance
and sensitivity defines
the ongoing music of our race,
swelling, dwelling, quelling,
telling—you know the song.

A glass bead rolls along the table top—
does that feel truer?
Are you you when you’re asleep?
That’s what poor mothers wonder
when the brat is finally snoring
gently, gentle smile or no
expression at all.
How brave to be a mother!
The only real heroes that we have.

But I am wandering
from my rosary,
distracted by the truth,
that cry in the night,
that flesh in the forest
I’m forcing myself to go on,
aren’t you, into the all
too well known—to be
conquistador of the obvious!
And then the real magic starts.

I am one of a hundred of us
lined up, linked in time,
each one of us reciting
the same story in different words.
Or the same words
and meaning different things,
how can I be sure, I hear only
myself and the woman next to me.

They’ll finger us out
in a hundred years
but by then we’ll be doing something else,
in Devon maybe by the coast
or leaning on a silver
plow in Gulistan.

9 July 2020