OLD LIFE

I leave you by the road,
carelessly tied in graying cloth,
sharp objects threatening the fibers.
Textbooks I will never read,
recipes I will never follow,
clothes I will never fit in again.

I will let nothing die,
when it dies in spite of me,
I refuse to bury it.
Picking wounds to keep bad memories
in a constant festering.

All the people I have ever been
are trying to fit together in my clothes.
There is not room enough.
I drive down the highway,
my foot on the accelerator,
bright polish with purple shoes,
is the foot I have always wanted.
I try to remember my foot at other times,
but I can only have one set of feet at a time,
and these are the feet that I have now.
Who knows where the other feet have gone,
dissolved through decades of change.
Like a canvas painted over so many times,
the eye no longer sees what
the mind has lost sight of.

Trees root, rivers flow.
I am not none of what I was,
nor can I continue forever to be all of it.
I cannot swim with my old fear of water on my back.
It has taken me a lifetime to know this,
and still I hesitate to live it.
Leaving something means something will leave me.

The process of shedding is my most continuous act,
but I prefer it to be in boxes taken to Good Will,
favorite dresses listed like sighted birds in a book.
Au revoir, I have kept all that I can use,
farewell, goodbye and a thousand words
that delay the parting,
that keep me from living the truth.