In Part, In Toto

Subtle awkward bumbles of a waning mid-September afternoon:
someone I assumed would find me devastatingly attractive
didn’t – today’s near-autumn cool bright blue come-hither
went about as thither as it could have gone: a vagrant dawn-and-hum
of headache – slight and pale – pain the color of the lank brown hair

of an unprepossessing lonely teenage girl – squirrels in and vibrates
mildly. Aging, as somebody once suggested to me who knew ruefully
that it was true, is the accretion of complexity, the convolution
of the possible into the multi-likely: the calculus for the solution
of which so defies my aptitude for math, I let it go its involuted

path, untended – and – I take a breath. Yes, I’m nearer now to death:
who isn’t? And out of the murky sea of me, exceeding any
expectation (since I had none, it did not especially surprise), arises
something – as if bent on telling me the business of the moment:
its intention and its size. Leaping from the metaphoric floor,

and feeding on the sunlight which would be, quite soon, in imminently
nearing night, no more – right foot planted like a platform,
left leg cut off from my vision at the thigh, so high had it ascended
towards the sky – torso, arms and head flung widely, folding
backward as if there were no such obstacle as gravity or bone –

carrying a sac of some pink plasma – delicate, attached in threads
to butt and waist and back: like a uterus or heart, alone – whatever this
not unattractive creature came to say, in toto, or in part, it said it,
and went on its way, and here I am, complex, my head-ache fading,
looking for a coda even though I missed the intro – in part, in toto.

.