Perpetuum Mobile  

Both grandmothers in the beyond,

one ashen young

the other covered with

age spots and earth:

will they know about the threads

that knit them into a new story?

The first, a heroine without words,

without a body, a handful of dust

on the bottom of a lake. The other,

a protagonist with the eyes of a geranium,

with fingers in which reside work and fruit.

Together they are the confession

that we extend into permanence,

the axis around which we spin into a number.

When gravity slackens off,

when we are the sum of what is inherited

and what has been acquired, when we are

carried away in all directions,

will those two ever pull the thread,

unpick what they share?