Amy (inspired by the song “Sisters”)

Amy risks sleep only within firewalls of research
Stacked high about her hot, tired body.
As like a thick, woolen blanket she wraps her red hair,
The watery ripples of moonlight through the shutters,
And the still, heavy silence of summer around her
To extinguish embers still smoldering
In her every waking dream,
Since her near consummate arson attempt on her past.

To her dreams her lovers frequent
Like fireflies emerging in a vengeful lightning-cloud,
In the sun-moonlight of a steamy, August twilight.
They cackle like sparks
Emoted from dying embers disturbed
By shackle-weighted wanderings of restless regrets
Left to shuffle through the ashes
Of a smoking charnel of memories.

They hiss at her,
“You loved, burned, and buried us here—with you.”
But before she can close the shutters
To all the windows in her fire-gutted sanctuary,
Her body hot with fever shakes,
And with an involuntary kick
She topples her books into a meaningless pile
Of unrelated tables and formulas,
Smashing her alliance with her science¹
Against them all.

With a grim, ashen, tired face
Amy wakes and walks to her window
Over floorboards sun-warmed through slatted shades.
And with a shudder, she closes her shutters and stacks
The books that clutter her bed,
Then sets to working the many hands
Ordered to revolve and resolve inside her head,
Turning to open the shutters again.

Amy dresses in front of a big mirror
And watches the sun rise and set fire to her room,
She opens a book and learns new formulas to patrol
Her deepest corridors of thought,
Then seals off the empty places, and begins again
To shovel dirt on the fires starting everywhere.

¹“Sisters”, The Church. “Don’t you understand her science/Merging in a strange alliance to her”.

9/20/93 rev. 10/3/93 rev. 4/18/94 rev. 6/22/98