Transition

A poem by Maren C. Tirabassi

I found a curl of birch bark,
white and paper-layered,
lying in my path
down by the lake behind
the place I'm going to leave
and I carried it away
in my hands,
not being a maker of canoes,

although perhaps I am,
and it fell to me by rights,

in spite of all my desire
that my transformations
would be more
like the growth rings of oak,
an accumulated wisdom
which circles ever wider
as roots grow deep,
and less like this . . .

snake skin, chemo-hair
on the pillow,
shedding of one experience
before I can go on,
naked, to another.

All the world opines
how lovely is the blue
of robin's egg,
how wet-matted and
ungainly-hatched, the fledgling
which destroys the shell.