Coming Back Poem by Diane Lee Moomey

No sign upon your ten white
steps, mica-specked, nor on the fossil
rock beside them; nothing
written on the bell that, ringing,
should have brought you to me.
No omen in your invitation—days ago,
the flowered card—and so
through door-glass curved
with age, I watch you, stunned:
your bird-arms rise stiff as if
with cold, in what could be a wave.

You're brittle in your leather
chair, your red chair. Your stick arms—
so brown and dry beneath
your off-the-shoulder dress, so brave—
rise again, embrace me, erase our years
of silence. Embracing me as if as usual,
here at the end of them.

Your legs—careful, like herons
walking, stalking the pools
of your pain. Your bird's beak
nose, sharp enough now to shatter
the egg of the end of your life and hatch
you out somewhere far
beyond my reach.