by Laura Ann Reed<\/p>\n
\n after Joanna Klink
\n <\/p>\n
Woken again,
\nthis time by the woodpecker\u2019s beak
\nbattering the glass, repelling the feathered reflection.
\n So, is this what it means
\nto grow old\u2014to watch a bird in November,
\nto trace in memory
\nthe carmine clouds over a lake,
\nthe quivering iridescence of a fish the child I was
\nnever meant to catch, its tailfin slipping back
\ninto the water\u2019s accurate patterns.
\nAnd the people I\u2019ve met\u2014vivid and willful,
\nwith a mesmeric force that drew me
\nto them as into a field of wind,
\nnow like the sheen at dusk above the horizon,
\ndim and distant.
\n What does it matter, this waking
\nand mingling when even things in the immediate past\u2014
\nthe faces seen, the meanings made\u2014 resist fixity?
\nAnd yet, those friends and strangers, weren\u2019t you
\nmore of you with them than alone?
\nDidn\u2019t they keep you from congealing
\ninto a sorry fistful of needs?
\nToday, I think of my father, who
\nat eighty-six wanted only to die and couldn\u2019t.
\nAnd of my mother, who at ninety-nine wanted
\nonly to go on painting and couldn\u2019t,
\nher polio-stricken hands no longer doing her bidding.
\nI feel at the end of a certain way of being
\nin relation to them.
\n Where can I turn
\nthat is not some kind of ending? I trust,
\nsomewhat, in the lichen that clings to the bifurcated
\ntrunk of the cypress, the screech of the barn owl
\nthat lives in the pines behind my house,
\nthe clink of my husband\u2019s teacup on the saucer.
\n The world once seemed
\nwoven of my own vexation. Now,
\non another imperfect day, I am less of a weather event
\nthan I once was, and more spirit\u2014 gathering myself
\ninto some vaster time in which a green-stemmed seedling
\nstirs under the razed and blackened dirt years after
\nthe conflagration in the hills.
\n <\/p>\n
Laura Ann Reed is the author of the chapbook Homage to Kafka<\/em> (Poetry Box, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Wildness, The Laurel Review,<\/em> and other journals, as well as in nine anthologies including Poetry of Presence II<\/em> (Grayson Books, 2023) and The Wonder of Small Things<\/em> (Storey Publishing, 2023). lauraannreed.net<\/p>\n
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