She dreams in circles
Night drivers coursing through
The roundabout outside her house
Tyres sucking tarmac
In a centrifugal hum
Somehow out of phase
With the whirring fan above
Endings create beginnings
Like stars, marriages, love
She boils a brew
Milk and sugar stirred in whirlpools
Watching the dog chase its tail
Kids running rings
Maybe there is form in that
The ever tightening concentric
Regularity of repetition
The infinite circularity of the thing
She works shifts
Walking amongst the almost dead
Changing sheets, holding hands
Hearing their memories
As time folds in on them
Like a self-seal envelope
The past emerging in spasms
Then spinning out of reach in gyres
“Yes, I remember…” becomes “Who are you…?”
I am your son, your daughter, your wife
Completing some cycle
Where we all return to the source
Ending as we became
Incontinent and inchoate
Parked in a bed not our own
In an unremarkable suburb
Our needs tended to by strangers
Who seem vaguely familiar
She watches the news
Sipping white wine
Appreciating a bird’s eye view
Of a cyclone spiraling off the coast
A series of circles come to reclaim us
Churn us into sea and dust
Above her the fan whirls
And ancient truths unfurl
Like spider web spirals
Portents of a calm
That will come to us all
After the storm
© shaun patrick green 2021
