Poem: The Change

The Change

so I want to talk about the way the seasons are changing:
how the days are shaking off the peach fuzz and gold lace,
the last of the late roses and the warmth of the midday sun.
reaching for the sharp edges of hospital white stars in an endless black sky
the dubious steel and blue-tinted cream of cloudy rain-bearing afternoons.

The nights are getting longer and the air turning colder 
nights spent with covers fully drawn and the small electric radiator on low
the cat adhered to my ribcage, humming and velveteen
hiding from the world.

The aching flame of autumn is almost out now,
in the garden and the sky and also in my body:

my body, that has followed the rhythms of the month as steadily as a heartbeat
since I was eleven years old; every month
except when full of child
cursing and blessing me with blood and with the relief from blood
the pain and the mess and the way my heart lightens
every time, is renewed and made whole
my fears and my failures subsiding with the bleeding 
bringing joy in the morning

every month for forty one years;
and this how I have learned to be in my life
the waxing and waning of the little seasons of my body
dark days offset by light ones
the alchemy of the body and how it communes with my brain
with my soul

and now I wake at night engulfed in a furnace
and I can't always remember things I once easily recalled
and the panic that claws at me in the ghost hours has no respite and no end

and I have not bled since the last of the sunflowers wilted away, when autumn was newborn
its days and nights still honey-dipped and beautiful

all my children long-ago born and are fully grown, and yet
I cried for an hour thinking about the way that door has closed now
about the end that gestures, like a wraith of autumns future, to the final end

about this little death: of who I have been
embodied as I am, living in cycles 
until the wheel runs down, and the seasons slow

and the change comes, for which I was not, I now understand, prepared:
and I am stepping through this door with my heart in my hands
waiting to see, waiting for the light
in this next life after life
as my bones reach out to winter.