Exit Notes

I do not fit this new stage,
a bra fits better, even one that is too small
or too big-straps too thin cutting into my small shoulders
and digging in-
a universal truth we gave up
on our way out of the comfort zone.

For you who are ten, twenty, five
years my junior, I'm just babbling, scribbling
with tapping fingers on a plastic tablet
a directorial note for myself, as though
I will return one day and re-step on this stage.

Where was mother at this stage?
Did I experience her loneliness, her
ample body tottering on solid pavement
her eyes fearful, her mouth ready to remind
me of what I had no knowledge of.

"You never were my age!" I remember yelling at her
when I was sixteen, eager for freedom and adventure
shaming her for having married early in life.
As though she knew what she was doing.
As though she had the freedom to refuse that stage of
life that chains itself to other stages, while the mothers in the
family and the fathers too, sign contracts and give their daughters away.

I'm not giving up my freedom, even at this stage. I will
choose the day I die, and how I die, I say this now
and maybe tomorrow too, while the sun is shining
and my teeth don't hurt
and the results of the last mammogram are
not in yet.

The minute you die, though, most people who knew you
will not remember much about you. Just the moment they
stood up to you, in big and small ways, to check their stand
on things, even their view of the audience obscured by the
feeling of power at that moment,
on that small piece of stage
where our verse was spoken,at times in a single word or phrase,
often borrowed for the moment, too afraid to know how
to stand up tall, a la Whitman
or Shakespeare, revealing
more that ever
the struggle
that life
is
from its first to the last breath.