Visions

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible. -- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

(Gainesville, Florida, mid-June)

Driving west on 222, a sudden, sharp beauty--
streets lined with loblolly and slash pine,
impossibly precise bough and leaf edges
against light, a hundred feet up in lapis sky,
alto and cirrocumulus billows layered
miles high in cream, alabaster, shining white.
My eyes in flight, I do not know who's steering,

like the time I went alone to an amusement park,
divorced, the children with their dad that weekend
while I rode the roller coaster, in the front seat, twice,
heart pounding, fingers tightly curled around the bar
in front, my body flinging side to side around the curves,
eyes focused on the drop defying gravity, and on a future
where I could believe that anything was possible,

or like the seven heightened days eleven years ago
anticipating loss of both my breasts to cancer,
struggling to accept the moment. Dr. Pickens
might as well have been prescribing oxytocin,
calling every night to say, "I'm sending love and prayers,"
and how I floated into surgery, to my astonishment,
with joy and not despair, because you cannot
know you might not be alive another year.