The first ten years the secret drills
your insides till your hollow flesh,
tired and emptier from pushing babies out,
betrays its state by getting a glow
reminiscent of transparency.
Free love passed you by those years.
You'd bought it already, dearly,
before the flood.
The next ten years were work, work, work,
filling up your hole with dirt and burying what you knew,
that the baby you'd given away was becoming a man,
somewhere, and you'd look at him drinking and think
does he even remember? He showed no hint.
What was he supposed to remember?
You wish you could say. But it was imprecise
and floating, like a blotch of light at the corner of your eye,
like a mythical creature that disappears
when you face it directly.
Or turns you to an empty, brittle, stone urn.
Decade three was crashing,
rotting bodies, disappearing.
When your daughter died, you might have remembered,
a quick thought of a son above ground;
decade four was bandages and pus,
as your husband sailed away
on a beer and auto-immune funded ride
to the inside of a waiting urn.
All without speaking it.
The last ten years and the world is new and it doesn't just occur to you
it is capable of being spoken:
the 17-year-old country girl just arrived in town,
the beer, the panic, the nuns, the way
things just were. They just were
hollow and invisible and difficult to say.
