PARTLY REVEALED by Linda Simoni-Wastila

If you look close enough
in the mirror
soft creases trample
from your eyes,
so many tired circuits
relaying books read,
poems written,
tears shed.

Closer still, lines
surround your lips
carved canyons of past belly
laughs, false and true,
of smiles held too long,
of child’s play, of day lilies
before they spend themselves
in summer’s swelter.

If you dropped your robe
I could touch the crescent
under the clavicle
left from dog’s teeth;
the roughened skin
that failed to take
after the burn ran us
from the farm; the

indent too small to see
by the aureole but
certain to touch, souvenir
of the biopsy; the cleft
beneath once linked
to your mother,
where son, then daughter
bellowed forth.

The mirror reveals all,
map of your life, meager, full.