Your thinning hair has the look of wishes.
Even your skin is riddled with white space, a fiction.
And your arms’ flesh-colored wash
is wishing too, to rise and fall, embrace
and release, but you do only the slow taper
toward peripheries, elapse and fade.
Perhaps you already knew as the painter
laid down the fiction, the fear of being
only this thin layer, a memory of drifting
into wainscoted walls, claw-footed dresser,
things that seemed wholly material, dense
with being. But your intermittence
is like a muscle’s fibrillation,
a flickering. It embodies you, like us,
as both endurance and loss.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 1.
Mary Moore has work in Birmingham Poetry Review, Unsplendid, and Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Negative Capability and more. Her first collection, The Book of Snow, was published by Cleveland State University in 1997.
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