After Adam Zagajewski <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />I am child to no one, mother to a few, <br />wife for the long haul. <br />On fall days I am happy <br />with my dying brethren, the leaves, <br />but in spring my head aches <br />from the flowery scents. <br />My husband fills a room with Mozart <br />which I turn off, embracing <br />the silence as if it were an empty page <br />waiting for me alone to fill it. <br />He digs in the black earth <br />with his bare hands. I scrub it <br />from the creases of his skin, longing <br />for the kind of perfection <br />that happens in books. <br />My house is my only heaven. <br />A red dog sleeps at my feet, dreaming <br />of the manic wings of flushed birds. <br />As the road shortens ahead of me <br />I look over my shoulder <br />to where it curves back <br />to childhood, its white line <br />bisecting the real and the imagined <br />the way the ridgepole of the spine <br />divides the two parts of the body, leaving <br />the soft belly in the center <br />vulnerable to anything. <br />As for my country, it blunders along <br />as well intentioned as Eve choosing <br />cider and windfalls, oblivious <br />to the famine soon to come. <br />I stir pots, bury my face in books, or hold <br />a telephone to my ear as if its cord <br />were the umbilicus of the world <br />whose voices still whisper to me <br />even after they have left their bodies.<br /><br />Linda Pastan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/self-portrait/
