Always light poured through
at the top of the broken stairs
and there was music.
Night after night she struggled
and slipped and crossed chasms
on bridges made of twigs.
One night she awoke
to discover she had arrived:
A cold stone church
where a company of actors
practiced a miserable play
while ballerinas in heavy
black shoes pounded
down the yellow aisle.
A red-lipped nurse in clown-
white shattered through a stained glass window
pushing a laughing skeleton on a gurney.
A thin gray man dipped
a broom in a font of glue and pasted
himself to the Eastern wall where
he hung and cried.
She wanted to go home
to her quiet old world
where the gods were still.
She wanted to leave now,
and could not
find her way.
(Who knows where poems come from?)
