A Cure — Like Yeats at Innisfree

She supposed her chi had slowed to a trickle.

That was how it felt, faint, hard to feel a flutter.

She supposed the cure would be

Portugal. But not the Algarve or Madeira.

Just a hut. In the north, shale hut, tumble down,

interior all of shadow, all of smoke, wood smoke.

She supposed therein lay remedy,

revival of a self that could love a fat dog, deep-dreaming dog,

plugging the doorsill in twelve o’clock sun.

And in the enclosure a goat and blinking kid.

The neighbors might not like her,

their chi strong with a sense of place

and the sureness of being as they had always been.

They might roll eyes

and suck teeth

at the weak-chi woman – alone but for goats and dog.

The dog, they knew though she did not,

belonged to old Ferreira but preferred her.

No matter. She could ignore them,

stay out of their way, keep hens.

At that she would succeed and the brown rightness

of each egg would prove her not a failure,

fortify her chi, as would the glow in the grate

and the three poems she wrote in winter.

Slowly, like the first steps of an invalid

rising from a brush with death

she linked, word to word across the page,

like chains of  RNA.

In March she turned the goat out

into new pasture. Planted peas.

By June she supposed her chi

flowed stronger. Just a season or two stronger,

and wild — like the lavender

flash flooding the slopes.

                            —  Roz Calvert