Get over yourself

I am over myself.

I am more over myself than you are.

I am so over myself that I'm a double-decker.
I am four-ply.

Over my self 
I hover like a cloud,
soar like a kite
tethered by the thinnest of lines.

I am in geo-synchronous orbit
above my self, looking down
on a landscape of mountains,
me, and rivers,
and highways, towns and streets.


In Your Dreams

You soar over rooftops,
run light-foot across the park,
bicycle down flowery lanes.

You drive without a license, 
don't worry when the road 
turns to sky beneath the wheels.

Your son is always six and sweet
in your dreams,
your mother always smiles.

Here you sing
all the verses of borderland ballads
in a clear voice that never cracks

though later you show up naked 
to write the exam 
in a course you haven't taken.

You talk to the dead and the missing
in your dreams,
ask them "Why did you leave me?"

You hope to sleep long enough
to hear the answer.


This Girl

I

June disappeared in September
of our grade ten year—
one day there,
	the next a vacant desk.

In the busy narrative of our lives
her absence was a footnote.
We did not ask
	where she had gone.

Decades later she finds me,
we meet for lunch and I finally ask
what happened.  
	Where did you go?

"Do you remember my mother?"
I remember coolness, a cloud of disapproval
when we played records and danced 
	around the bedroom they shared.

"I came home from school one day," says June,
"and there was a woman in our living room.
	My mother said: 

		This girl is strong—
		this girl has good teeth—
		don't take lip from this girl."

II

The strange woman wanted a nanny, 
found a child in need and took her home.

I never went back, June says.  They're my family now.  
We're all going to Mexico next week for a cruise.

Lamb and blue cheese cool on my plate
while my universe readjusts.

I remember my mother that year—
unfeeling woman—she made me wear 

hand-knit sweaters, packed fruit in my lunches,
trashed my cigarettes.

Her mouth full of pins, she bent where I stood 
on a chair to mark a hem.  

"Mo-om!  It's too loooong!"
She pulled the pins, sighed.

"Half an inch.  I'll go up half an inch and not 
one bit more.  

That's good wool flannel 
and I won't cut it."