I look to the north
with a gaze I know you feel
through walls of concrete and brick
over miles of hills and highway,
to catch a first and teary glimpse
as you fade away.

New horizons fold
like hopeless hands, mistakes
driven through the heart
of bloodless lands.
Your wish is my regret, a distance
ruled by reprimand, an orphaned child
displacing blind ambition.

Perhaps I did not
flaunt my existence enough;
that might have changed the thing itself.
Perhaps I am
just a thing of the seasons;
isolated and lonely in the winter.

Spring's rape will divest me
of anonymity, dress me
in naïveté; the new girl,
head on the block,
severing connections
with static recollections, trusting
reinvention to be better than cure.

And in summer I will revell
in this new self
forgetting lessons of the past
held in the strawberry fields
and blackberry briars.
Would you leave me to it again?

A dog by any other name;
in season, marking time and place,
the pluck of petalled pride
fills your hands with flesh, your heart
with death. I refuse to waste away
in borderlands of bated breath;
the view clears as I look to the south.

03/27/2009

Posted on 03/28/2009
Copyright © 2024 Anita Mac

trusting
reinvention to be better than cure