Ana
  By Marguerite Guzman Bouvard

You gaze at the bush outside the window
of your tiny apartment, telling me
it throbs with birds, that it is winged
and filled with secret doors.
You soar with those birds
as they twitter among the branches.
You fly beyond the time of secret gatherings
under Batista when your life hung
in the balance and when you fled
the country you loved for the second time.
You fly above the long year
of your brother’s dying, above your grown children’s
sudden storms. You are sloughing off the skin
of discord and of the insignificant.
You are pared down now
to the blue waters of Varadero, the papayas
glistening in your father’s garden,
the poems by Ruben Dario where nothing
can be destroyed. Weightless,
you are what you were meant to be,
wrapped in wonder, your eyes
brimming with the unseen.