Listen
  By Ann Hunkins

You are busy folding t-shirts and matching
socks, wondering what your life will become.
You are busy buying butter and eggs,

driving down aster-studded highways
wondering where you are headed.
You are busy sleeping, untangling

dreams, asking oracles, reading skies, books
and magazines, listening for news of yourself,
something that will tell you which way to turn.

Listen. All that time, inside the culverts
of your heart, inside the sheer fabric
of passing months, fleeing years, hidden

in plain sight, suns and moons blossoming
and dying, you are dying a slow death,
pushing your hands out through blown

sands and cracking clay. Your lips
are fading like a figure drawn in chalk,
your eyes becoming stilled, stilled.

Every morning, from the pine tree in your head,
a bird repeats its half-finished sentence
willing you to listen, really listen.