How a Woman Describes Hope in Midlife

How a Woman Describes Hope in Midlife

Not yellow. Not feathered
or winged. Not breathing. Not
a breast. A womb. The feckless
night. Not a man. Not the gruff north
wind. Not the prairie. Not the Gulf.
Not the places fled in the dusk.
Not the places fear builds in the mind.
Not the relentless thump thump thump
of my dumb heart. Not the wheat
fields, the silos, the oils sands. Not
the dead, whom I miss so fiercely
at this distance. Not the faint light
of the streetcars, the wildfires,
the suicide sky. Not the bridges
that forgive water levels. Not the rain,
unburied. Not the little I have left
to look forward to, except the child
that empties of me like the body
from a lake. Not even these,
my deaths, which some days sound
like the bells in the belly of the goat
that still roams the alleys of my child-
hood, starving. Instead, notice
the trees. How they ask for nothing,
except to be, for centuries.

 

 

 

Address

For the first time in years, I don’t know
light. A family of rabbits lives

in the alleys and fields behind houses. The sun
has gone out. The world, at war.

I try to remember what I want. Connection.
Someone close enough to see. And yet

distance is the animal
sky, always in retreat.

I miss God some nights.
How easily we give up on things

we can’t see. Staggering, the dark
seems to hold all that exists

now. I don’t know how
the world ends, but I know fire

lies. Somewhere, the trees burn
to wicks of what they once were.

I can’t think about the sound as they burn.
There is so little left worth listening for.

 

 

 

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Art Information

• "Sunset" and "Archways" (details) © Jocelyn Pike; used by permission.