CONVALESCENCE

The rain has been heavy, intermittent, dull
against her bedroom window. Outside
the wisteria on its slender trellis reminds her

of an image she saw once
in leaded glass. What is sacred
is now utterly and immediately
so, flaunting its beauty
redeemable in light, the thick gold
afternoon sun like fingers braiding
and unbraiding the vines, refracted

blue, aquarium blue, Mary’s color, salt sea-
light pattered on the floor when you step
inside the chapel, color of water moving
and changing over crude slabs of stone. This

is what it feels like to be well, or
almost well—to know again the sacrament
of hope, like a penitent, and know,
at once, she made the world her hell.


DISTANCES

Gently, she lifts the shell of the dead insect
from its resting place on the carpet beside
her desk, deposits it

into the wastepaper basket and resumes
her work, taking pen in hand, as though
nothing had happened. And nothing has,

not really, in the world. She already knows
the endless distances of things, of people
from each other and themselves, knows of loss
and the stillness that follows. The silence.

She knows of dishes drying on the kitchen
counter in the sun, the hollow blast
of sirens along the expressway, the neighbors’
garage light blinking on when a night jogger
flits past on his way home. She knows

that everyone lives somewhere else and leaves
their bodies to carry on the tasks of life
and rain comes in fits and starts
and children kick a muddy soccer ball in the front yard
or take their piano lessons wishing to be outside
on sunny days. The distances are there,

in their music, and change comes slowly,
if at all. In the evening after the children
have gone to sleep, through a window she can see
the small blue flicker of a television set.