MOUNTAINS

All that life might have been
lies arrested in my chest.
Truth, that other side to reality,
whose memory never dies
only holds its tongue out of necessity,
the woman I could have been
stillborn in my own life.

I see her pensive at a desk,
laughing in some dark bar.
She walks with me,
thrashing about in some blazer,
which is trying hard to earn the rent,
tempting the middle-age I have somehow
gotten myself into the middle of.

She used to drink transformational mescal
smuggled back from the interior,
she drank it to get back to the interior,
Now she has become undemanding,
like a wallflower at a dance,
willing to wait past her own
extinction.

Here’s to the woman who sought
the things she could not name,
the one who learned the hard way,
and repeatedly.