Old Soul

A secretary in my office took one of my poems off the printer this morning and read it. It was a piece I'd written about an old woman contemplating her body, from the inside. I didn't like the poem all that much five seconds after I wrote it, and I know some things are inaccurate and need fixing, but the secretary said to me, "You, my dear, are an old soul. You are in tune with things you've never experienced. You're one of those people who has come back in a different form." It was probably one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. She said her grandma used to say it about children who seemed to know more than they should, who were intuitive. Anyway, I wanted to write it down so I don't forget it. It meant a lot. Here's a little piece of the poem:

She still doesn't understand where the cancer

has seated itself. In the aged palms of her ovaries,

climbing up and down the ropes of her veins,

napping in each swelling node as if they were

tree-houses, as if they were forts waiting for disease

to tell its ghost story beneath the foreboding glow

of flashlights. She watches the tumors roll out

against her skin in the tender spider veined cavity

behind her knees, in the weighted slope of her jaw.

I get to leave work early because of the snow. Then I get to finish one graduate school application.