Rosey, Leaving

At eighteen, she sings as if she’s been alive for centuries–a voice
filled with old sorrow and flowers,  the lost child on the twisted street,
the woman in a doorway with her hand on her brow
peering out in a season of drought. And if her song rises, you can hear the far-flung moon,
the man who turned his face away and kept on walking–I could go on.
When she was five, she’d never heard opera but woke up singing it.
I assumed then her soul had traveled places I couldn’t see before
She got to me, and now she’s leaving. When she was six she wept with rage
when a wounded bird died in her hands. Mothers are lovers and insane.
We think it will go on forever, and it will, but not like this, ever again.
This is the last day she can walk through these rooms and not be a visitor.
I want to tell her there is no way to thank her enough.
That before she came, I was racing around a dark field, looking for home.