Blackbird Archive← v16n2, Fall 2017Poetry · Volume 16, Number 2
Poem after the Equinox, 2015
Like exhibits that house
indecipherable butterflies, or birds
whose beauty droops them, the psych ward
requires two sets of doors, to keep that world from this.
What to say of a passage
where just one way may open
only if the other shuts?
What to say of the mind
immune to such truths?
As mine was, when I woke in summer to sweeping,
my parents’ home, close outside the window.
My mother by then barely able to stand,
sweeping a walk long since clean
and I heard in it only the old noise
of her keeping us safe.
But now we have tipped past the equinox.
Now we limp on the night side of things.
