Does she doubt the summer,
the little woman who lies,
sleeping in sunlight—dozing in the ether?
Her spindly fingers, pianoplaying,
lovemaking fingers crack in the cold.
The wind blows from the north.
And in the three months we have left to wait,
she ages forty eight years. When summer comes,
she is an old woman, with wrinkles like contours
and lips chapped from disuse.
For I heard that the seasons move slowly,
here, in the valley beneath the apricot mountains,
where the clouds are fuschia and we are dull.
But to be left at the altar by a man
who has not stumbled from his mistress’
bed—that moment flickerflashes for eternity,
blinks like morse code behind eyes longing for rest,
and summer dawdles.
The little woman with scars of Africa
longs for warmth. It will not arrive before she is on her deathbed
at twenty years of age.
