Spinning Daughter

In a video, you spin before Milan Cathedral:
your dress swings, flares open like an umbrella,
shelters landing pigeons that peck at the ground.
Tourists stream behind you, minute hand sweeps,
clouds scrub the sky, the sun winks out.

For years we spun in circles, you dizzy,
undiagnosed, sleeping your life away. Time halted,
wouldn't budge. I despaired for your future.
Now, far away, you twirl before a cathedral
like that silhouette illusion of a pirouetting dancer
teasing the hemispheres of our brains.
I'm of two minds, the one that misses you
and the one that rejoices in your clockwise whirl,
that knows the misery behind this joy,
the stillness behind this motion.

Abruptly, like that kinetic optical illusion,
you change direction, everything happens in reverse,
as if, now tightly wound, you unwind, counterclockwise,
momentum, once begun, refusing to let up:
birds spit up crumbs, rear up their heads, 
are yanked into the air by tail feathers,
inhaled by a wind that scissors all the legs backward.
Clouds rapidly return to their original position,
the sun appears, disappears, reappears again,
clock hands race to retrace their path,
as if all in your wake, the earth wobbling from the sun,
and back again, whole seasons passing in a blur.