Your abrading angel

pins you with her eyes, “Put down your book,” she says, “high time
to read between the lines of your tangled life,
that’s where the clarity is, Honey.”

“Back then,” she says, “before you were given your script to memorize,
and hustled out the double doors to follow the stipulated dream,
you used big ingenious slashes of crayon, drew, bold, ego-less, cerise clouds,
for a sky you’d seen in the world you forgot after you were born.”

But it’s fear and loneliness and getting old you want to talk about,
but can’t find words to begin.

“Listen,” she says, “to the craving of a kestrel, watch the lightning
turns of dragonflies, the grey squirrel rappelling down a willow, see the dying
elm gilded in crimson, purple loosestrife gracing the pitted parking lot,
have you forgotten the perfume of fir trees? or play some Mitchell
or Morrison, anything to clear the bog from your mind.”

“But some regrets I can’t forget,” you say, “some ache I just can’t take.”

“Look,” she says, “all goes onward and outward,
the sunrise blazes, the sunset baptizes, and between
is mayhem and bliss, and the world you forgot is this world,
and this world of beauty and sorrow is midwife to the next,
and the next won’t be like anything anyone ever supposed.

“So get on with it, Gorgeous, gather up those tangled lines,
roll them up like wool,
spin them into something like gold.”