Ellen Porter
8/31/07
These Burdensome Threads

Today’s melancholy
threads through my fingers, my toes
wraps me in a shroud
so snug and smooth
I cannot wiggle against
its constraint.

I don’t know from where it rises
leaving me paralyzed,
this grief.
I only know it holds me
faster than God
faster than creation, itself.

Yet in this interminable moment
I survive these burdensome threads.
I do not plummet to final darkness.

I cannot weep
and so I wait
not struggling but dissolving
into prehistoric soup.
And then each segment of myself,
floating free,
melancholy abandoned,
refashions me in new design,
part holding to part, and me waiting,
cupped in this binding:
a chrysalis, a cocoon
a possible, perfect reformation.


Ellen Porter
3/14/07
Time Change

If it were
solstice or equinox
my body might
understand.
My blood and breath flow
backwards or ahead
of their own volition.

But this artificial
tampering with time
to mediate daylight
or darken morning skies.
This my body fights
with deliberate rage.
As dark and light
vie for ascendance,
I sit with coffee
in oblivious, dying stupor.