10 Stages of my Woman

1. She is born:
eyes welded shut with screams (hers
and her mother's),
full of tiny fingernails and fragments
of heart.
Her father, drunk, slumps
against the radiator.

2. She learns a new skill:
foot after another,
one-two, one-two (an uncertain dance).
A bare grin-gap illuminates her lips.
The video tape runs and runs;
she sits,
legs at beetle angles.

3. She grows
up, like a sprout,
finds unusual hairs.
The cold mother face turns -
instruction comes from gossip,
whispers are law.
She wakes to bloody sheets.

4. She meets a boy
so full of sunshine and words;
His lips and her lips
all over each other in a story of hot skin.
He traces her new breast, lightly,
as they lie together on her single pillow.
She arches like an old cat.

5. She loses:
young love drifts
and she forgets about passion
(or beauty, or
wanting to be beautiful).
The houses and the roads
box her into solitude.
The stars blink rapidly.

6. She works:
Paper piles fluctuate and
deadlines pass.
She crosses the line once
or twice:
sometimes doesn't read the smallprint.
She aches for home
but will find no one there.

7. She swells,
finally, and suddenly knows
what it was all for
(and the blood)
and when the baby comes,
she names, eagerly,
with the songs of rivers.

8. She wanes:
loses her month.
Her joints ache now, closing her world
even further.
She mourns her warmth
and her sex.
The earth moves too quickly -
her daughter has grown up,
busy making love with youth.
The sunbeams shatter on her hard
mother-eyes.

9. She fades,
slowly,
sees her grandchildren laugh
in blonde.
She remembers her mother,
calls for her in a daydream without
thinking about it.
The needle of the gramophone
gets stuck in a rut.

10. She dies:
her ashes are sprinkled under a tree
in her daughter's yard.
They had a little service, just
for family;
"Did she ever, they asked, "accumulate
Friends?