Trees when cut down offer a history in rings.
Sideways cuts into rock or revealed ledges
after a flood offer a typography of time.

I fell backwards in the post office, a foolish,
unexpected fall, irking my brain as to how.
While I scrambled to restate myself, others

came like crows to assist me as I pulled at
an inadequate metal railing; they hauled me up
admonishing that they had fallen, too.

I was sore, but intact. I looked around me
for my mail, stacked neatly by one helper.
How had I gone over backwards while bending
forward to pick up a dropped letter? And how
had I traveled so far from an alcove into
the entrance hall? What imbalance did this?

Much later, home, getting dinner, I worry about
hairline cracks in my hips. I scoop tabouleh
from a large glass bowl, tapping the spoon on the bowl.

The bowl breaks in concentric rings, huge and small,
turning the bowl into a catastrophe of glass.
At my age, what tap will undo my bones?

  Virginia Walker