Marjorie A. Buettner: MAKING BEDS

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Like the Pythagoreans who ward off the evil eye by smoothing the body's imprint on the bed, I find myself caught in rituals I do not quite understand. I only know I am compelled: making beds, burning incense, lighting candles where ever I go. I try to keep my family safe from harm, the sign of the cross never far from action.

.
after the snowfall
my children's angel prints
disappear
as if they were never here
as if I were never here

by Marjorie A. Buettner

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Marjorie A. Buettner: SQUARING THE CIRCLE

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There are times when I feel Orpheus rising, ready to look back upon Eurydice, warned yet fascinated, yearning for that lost home, for those hands that are not my hands stretching out, now, helpless. There are times then when the turning back mimics an escape as if a bow held just so forgets that it knows the flight of the arrow before the target appears. And like a circle without beginning or end, I turn, the arrow above my heart still quivering. So this day is heavy with an unnameable regret which pulls at memory like a magnet realigning the poles that were you and I, rearranging the past, dislocating the future, leaving the present pregnant with false desire beyond the support of action or hope. It is a present which wants to fold in on itself as if it were a sheet of origami, hibernating within it a flawless form unconscious of its ability to change, its transformation a mystery, its silken paper-thin wings, a chrysalis, wanting, unknowingly, to be born upon a spring wind.

squaring the circle

my youngest daughter's

origami

.

.

by Marjorie A. Buettner

Minneapolis, Minnesota

first published in Journeys #2, 2002