The world hasn’t changed.
The snow falls every winter,
the grass grows every summer.
The wood’s delivered and stacked each fall,
and brought to its place by the fire.
The body has the same needs
for food, warmth and touch
as it did last year. There are still days,
like always, when it struggles
with the onslaught of morning
and the pain of its limits—
teeth biting ice,
cold bones and arrhythmias
capsizing on a slow-moving glacier.
Disbelief, like brain freeze:
all these changes,
mountains I can’t move anymore.
Continents shifting and drifting
without my consent.
There are days I sleep
and don’t wake up.
The world hasn’t changed.
My heart still struggles against gravity.
The snow still falls and collects
by the seed cakes, where chickadees
fight over the squirrels’ sloppy seconds.
I still drift.
A neighbor is shoveling my snow outside;
I hear the blade scraping on pavement.
I’ve brought him Earl Grey tea in a travel mug
and went outside to trade small words.
It was hard—
I wanted to stay by the woodstove, pretending
I didn’t hear it, pretending I didn’t need this.
I am used to my glacier;
the cloak of invisibility
my snow globe affords.
It is hard to ask.
It is hard to accept.
It is hard to admit
the inevitability of need
and, within it,
the invitation to receive
and to give—again and again,
growing the ripples wider,
melting the glaciers into rivers
that water the grass in spring.
© Psyche Marks 2017