change

Each time they asked what beauty was, my answer changed. Blood on an enemy planet. Stolen marble behind hushed glass. The man who wrote the explanatory copy posted on the museum wall. My young bones shooting up like artillery weeds. A weird seed in the side yard that revealed itself an aster. Black cats with flamenco dancers’ hips. Facing eastwards in the woods at dawn with a hundred other girl scouts. Slack tide on a northern, loon-laced river. The pipevine swallowtail flexing on the peony. Your face. My face. An old woman warbling “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” Ginger Gold apples and a voice I’d follow into the dark. I’ve kept my name but I’m nothing like I started. Not so violent or so quiet. In my coat charged with ten thousand dusks, what I am is changed.