Beulah is 90

BEULAH

                       for MRG

Beulah fell asleep this afternoon

in her sidewalk chair.  Phosphor clouds

spun tacked-up overhead – caravels

unknotting archipelagoes of dreams.

Beulah is ninety.  All she’s done

was finished years ago – love, kids,

work... making, helping.  Now the swells

of receding seasons wester into beams

of sundown.  The scramble to survive,

the ferris wheels of sex and politics,

her wrestlings with faith and doubt

are folded into one frail dormant hive

of arms, face, breast.  Fleet prolix

dreams fuse with the Dreaming she’s about.