The End of Her

The End of Her

The world looks different.
There is no association, nothing familiar,
and yet, I know they're called trees,
I know what I hear is called traffic.

Swimming, without water,
reaching at nothing,
there is a hum around me which is
menacing in its subtlety and thoughtful strategy.

On every side of me there is a crevasse,
endless and infinite,
and she's down every one of them,
imperceptible and free.

I teeter with sorrow and
bend to the frantic madness.
My influence is an illusion;
I've no sway in the scheme of it all.

The promise of the world I was born to is gone;
the order of things once made sense to me,
coddled me, tethered me, swaddled me in its
implicit love and senseless quarrels.

Now, I float.
I free fall.
She, who had her position
at the back of things, at the front of things
at the side of everything, despite the
often thorny divergence of mother and daughter,
is no more.

I call out to her
evoking the need of my infant self,
and find that I am alone in the crib,
looking at an empty doorway,
waiting for her to come through.