In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.
Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days,
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.
I turn my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my young mind across another,
I have met my mother’s mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings
arms that hold answers for me,
intimate, waiting, bounty:
“Carry me.” She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.
From Eve (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Annie Finch