And this is called "One Life."
A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs
recalls great bodily joys, much pain.
Nothing in her is apt to say, my heart aches.
Though she read those words in a battered college text
this morning as the sun rose, it is all too mixed,
the heart too mixed with laughter raucousing the grief--
her life too mixed.
She shakes her heavy silvered hair
at all the fixed declarations of baggage.
I should be dead and I'm alive.
Don't ask me how.
I don't eat like I should, and still I
like how the drop of vodka hits the tongue.
I was a worker and a mother, that
means a worker and a worker.
But for one, you don't pay union dues or get a pension.
For the other, the men ran the union, we ran the home.
It was terrible and good.
We had more than half a life.
I had four lives at least.
One out of marriage, when I kicked up all the dust
I could before I knew what I was doing.
One life for the girls on the line during the war.
Yes, painting our legs and jitterbugging together.
One life with a husband, not the worst.
One with your children, none of it just what you thought,
none of it for it could have been if we'd known.
We took what we could, but even this is a life.
I'm reading a lot of books I never read my daughter brought
home from school--
plays where you can almost hear them
talking, romantic poets, Isaac Babel.
A lot of lives worse and better than what I knew.
I'm walking again.
My heart doesn't ache.
Sometimes though, it rages."