evidence

​The sun rises before me now, casting a
yellow bar across the bathroom mirror.
Cold water and toddler senses, I actualize my
fingers, the movement of eyelids.
 
Reaching out from the gathers of my eyes
I see there are fine eggshell cracks, laughing,
splintering the crest of my cheekbone
into tidal patterns, deltas, highways
 
I remember mothers of my friends, more
delicate and polished than my woodsmoke
and raw onion sturdy mother, warning me
against the sun, about the sea, about light
 
As if the fractures and creases of living
and the spangled decay of age
and the inevitable fall from grace
into a fragmented, wrinkled joy stained
 
life
could be avoided
 
 
 
 
 
may 2015, copyright Sarah Hirsch