In conversation with Rilke and Ocean Vuong
What if getting old is traveling backward,
regaining your first eyes,
your portion of blood and bone
no longer scaled with wound. Suppose
you awake without your skin, all your senses
felled by sleep. The girl you were
is gone. So you breathe in the moon,
rebuild yourself in the shadow of its light
until your torso is the translucent cascade
of your breath and you see, through the lens
of your last hour, the instant you first opened
to earth’s color and earth’s air.
In the act of going forward and back
all your borders explode into sky,
and there is no time you cannot be.
Susie Patlove was a finalist for the 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council Award. Her work has appeared on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and in Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. Poems of hers have been anthologized in Morning Song (St. Martin’s Press). Her chapbook Quickening was published by Slate Roof.