I

I’m a middle-aged woman
not quite resigned to the fact.
Out the window there’s the constant stream
of cars, the dogs who need walking,
finches at the feeder.
Last Sunday, at Aqua Dulce,
the pine meadow with Eleanor’s ashes
still had snow on the shady side,
tucked under the granite rocks.
Off the desert floor came the dry
wind of my childhood, reeking
of sage and burnt cornbread.
Back then, the rain had a metallic edge
of rivers and summer storms from Baja.
Here on the wall is a desert watercolor
where John Murphy’s path
leaves the edge of the picture frame.
These days I don’t laugh
unless it’s induced, and usually
at my own expense.
If I opened the door I could leave
like a snake shedding a skin
that catches in the wind.

II

I’m not sure I care who I am.
The window is like a mirror, reflecting
back the faces of who I’ve been.
As a toddler, my first sense of conflict
came from electrical sockets,
an intuition that I would never have
any control over the desire for shock,
that current to the soul that never leaves
but is so hard to keep open.
Funny, in these dark dips at night
I read Stendhal instead of Yeats,
despair of my work, the lack of time,
of words that hang outside of speech,
of this pegged and pigeon-holed life
that opens no doors for wind of any kind.

III

I’m the woman of your dreams
that can’t be bothered.
What’s outside the window doesn’t matter.
It will all change tomorrow.
When I was six, it hailed so hard
the rye grass froze, bent spikes of green
poking up through the white lawns.
In that cold world, the air
had a promise of change I still look for.
Like a sex dream that hangs with you
into the trenches of classrooms
and faculty meetings,
it’s the last thing I see at night
falling backwards into the velvet deep,
into a world not unlike this conscious one
predictable, squared and balanced,
a four-corned reality
with the windless ring of silence.
Just the scent of it makes me
want to dance and sing
like the child I’m not.