She Lived in Retreat

She lived in retreat

from her too-good child

and the woman she supposed she would be

in the jumpers she made,

the same Simplicity pattern varied

in color, print, the weight of the weather.

She longed for belonging, rebellion,

that two-sided coin she could toss

that would name her a diviner.

She believed that everything—where the ferns

grew in Golden Gate Park near the swampy fens

and the water lilies, St. Matthew Passion on Sunday

while the brutal gospel of the black Baptists

across the street rang in the windows—

all was right and good. Evil

was someone else’s fairy tale.

She loved to stretch in the sleepy morning

into her life of surety and meander

She woke—I woke—with a tab

of Owsley in the bedroom upstairs

when the walls fell, the ceiling was sky,

and the trip to the ocean that followed.

I saw the cricket at the edge of the universe

ready to leap and, when it did,

stood on Roethke’s three stairs in space,

watched the fall of faceted forms

that met facet to facet and then fell away,

the embroidered figures of lovers and fronds

and gold pistils and stamens—

Persian miniatures, I found at the library later.

Never seen before now.

And the ocean, where I could see

not only the seventh wave but the six

before it, and the six

gathering in the outer swells.

Looking up from the grass that day

where I lay in the park of the wobbly present,

I heard the counsel of azaleas above me,

the ageless momentary flower,

the accidental bee,

the one petal falling.

gl