Level-headed.
In that home, poise was a virtue honed through
a sardonic attitude toward the use of books:
The gravitas of classics and
weight of histories were transmuted
farcically into literal gravity,
to calibrate a muscular keenness for
interpreting imbalance,
adjusting response.
Columnar girls,
holding up virgin
tomes, with the straightest spines.
Yes, it was still like that recently.
Who knew this prim tutorial in
feminine comportment—
to help grim sisters stiffly pallbear
their uncracked, funereal lives—
was necessity encrypted, an urgent warning
obscured by its own
comic obsolescence.
The stuff of old films.
Funny and sad.
These days, I bear myself,
an atlas of cryptogeography in
two hands.
I balance the glass orb of my
empty eye,
refracting cartographic distortions
when I tip.
It rolls, and
I scry this crystal ball for direction
but it changes.
My arms have tired of keeping such a fragile balance,
the way a still head
never made me tired.
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