Fall

Lamentation

If you insist, God, that I stay alive
then what consolation? Don’t I too deserve more
than a couple hours of joy?

Entitlement is a nasty word.
I know too much about grief
and the ache in an old dancer’s hips.

Shivers of midnight light on downy quilts
no longer convince me that Beauty
makes these years of strain worthwhile.

I know the pain of surrender to gravity;
release to a hard, cold earth as the only way
to bliss. Beauty hurts,

so like an autumn leaf trembling
on the tip of an oak branch, I suspend
in quiet gold until it is my time to fall

and become nothing again.