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"More Ways of Things"
I have heard that to hold two truths in one's heart
At the same time is wisdom, that to wish always for things
to be different is to forget that the shadow moves
as the sun commands. When I was a girl
I drove through the Alps with my mother, singing.
I told her stories to keep her awake. She told me that a woman
who travels alone is a women who knows what she wants
and a woman who knows what she wants is a woman with
something to say. She made me promise to never forget it.
Not so many years later I carried her death around with me
in my pocket, worried at it like a talisman, my ticket out,
my ticket to anywhere, no strings attached.
My sister wants to know why we can’t be friends.
It's because I wasn't there, isn't it? Isn't it? she hisses.
Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them.
It isn't spring's sure greening or the seedling's pluck and grit, it's
my own keen eye for deadwood I've grown to trust,
how the wood gives like butter to a knife
beneath the chainsaw's certain bite, each stove length I cut
a warm thought that spins through my head, that's cached
in my heart, split
and stacked smugly between stands of birch and pine,
how they smolder, ready to catch and spark
as even a burned tree can reignite.
—Elizabeth Levitski
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