by Laura Ann Reed
after Joanna Klink
Woken again,
this time by the woodpecker’s beak
battering the glass, repelling the feathered reflection.
So, is this what it means
to grow old—to watch a bird in November,
to trace in memory
the carmine clouds over a lake,
the quivering iridescence of a fish the child I was
never meant to catch, its tailfin slipping back
into the water’s accurate patterns.
And the people I’ve met—vivid and willful,
with a mesmeric force that drew me
to them as into a field of wind,
now like the sheen at dusk above the horizon,
dim and distant.
What does it matter, this waking
and mingling when even things in the immediate past—
the faces seen, the meanings made— resist fixity?
And yet, those friends and strangers, weren’t you
more of you with them than alone?
Didn’t they keep you from congealing
into a sorry fistful of needs?
Today, I think of my father, who
at eighty-six wanted only to die and couldn’t.
And of my mother, who at ninety-nine wanted
only to go on painting and couldn’t,
her polio-stricken hands no longer doing her bidding.
I feel at the end of a certain way of being
in relation to them.
Where can I turn
that is not some kind of ending? I trust,
somewhat, in the lichen that clings to the bifurcated
trunk of the cypress, the screech of the barn owl
that lives in the pines behind my house,
the clink of my husband’s teacup on the saucer.
The world once seemed
woven of my own vexation. Now,
on another imperfect day, I am less of a weather event
than I once was, and more spirit— gathering myself
into some vaster time in which a green-stemmed seedling
stirs under the razed and blackened dirt years after
the conflagration in the hills.
Laura Ann Reed is the author of the chapbook Homage to Kafka (Poetry Box, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Wildness, The Laurel Review, and other journals, as well as in nine anthologies including Poetry of Presence II (Grayson Books, 2023) and The Wonder of Small Things (Storey Publishing, 2023). lauraannreed.net