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My Hair Burned Like Berenice
by Ruth Awad

And after nailed upon the night
Berenice’s burning hair.
—W.B. Yeats, “Her Dream”

Days of rain. The drey outside
my window would keel and
the wind would plunder. My heart
was valent with possibility:
I could be anyone now,
half woman, half asterism.
Fragmental as a new year.
Patron saint of the rutilant
and cindering. I could rove
incognito to places pinned in
office calendars.
Too long I’d mothered myself
with the admiration of onlookers.
I was grateful to be alone
in my abstraction. To be both
ignored and abraded
by a coarse sky. I did not offer up
parts of me like kindling. I will not
embellish a single hemisphere.
The ground bulges with a wet sound.
It is glutted with what was given.
I do the wolfish work of god
and make myself again. Ripen
like lichen on the pavement.
Like rain carrying the memory
of lightning.

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