An Old Woman

The past has come apart
events are vagueing
the future is a seedless pod
the present pain.

Not even pain has that precision
with which it struck youth.

Years like moths
erode internal organs
hanging or falling
in a spoiled closet.

Does you mirror bedevil you?
Or is the impossible
possible to senility?

How could the erstwhile
agile and slim self---
that narrow silhouette---
come to contain
this huge incognito---
this bulbous stranger---
only to be exorcised by death?

Dilation has entirely dominated
your long reality.