A poem called ''Palindrome."
Palindrome is a saying or word which reads the same backwards
and forwards.
And even though my poem doesn't do that, it--
I gave it the name because it plays
with the idea of two opposite motions, of forward
and the backward motion.
In this case, about the idea of there
being an anti-world in the universe.
In which, everything that happens here,
is happening there but in reverse order.
So therefore, the she in here, who is myself,
has an alter ego in the other world, who goes from her death
to her birth.
Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am putting on.
It is evening in the antiworld where she lives.
She is forty-five years away from her death, the hole which
spit her out into pain, impossible at first, later
easing, going, gone.
She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy.
She sees without glasses, she falls in love easily.
Her husband has lost his shuffle, they laugh together.
Their money shrinks, but their ardor increases.
Soon her second child will be young enough
to fight its way into her body and change its life to monkey,
to frog, to tadpole, to cluster of cells, to tiny island,
to nothing.
She is making a list.
Things I will need in the past.
Lipstick, shampoo, transistor radio, Alice Cooper,
acne cream, five-year diary with a lock.
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children.
She wants to read Crime and Punishment
and ride on a roller coaster without getting sick.
I think of her as she will be at fifteen, awkward, too serious.
In the mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar.
By now our lives should have crossed.
Somewhere sometime we must have passed one another
like going and coming trains, with both
of us looking the other way."
That line, things I will need in the past,
was stolen from one of our daughters.
Who was then very young and had just learned to write
and but was mixed up on concepts of time.
And she made this list of things she wanted
to buy in the dime store.
Which she had as, things I will need in the past.