A Woman of the Pharisees

Sunlight dances on the floor, the breeze opens and closes,

opens and closes the window. I am reading Mauriac,

and on every page I think; he's like a middlebrow Proust.

Sunlight dances on the floor, the breeze slaps the window shut.

My feet, with their bad circulation, for once are warm.

What Proust made deep, Mauriac made banal

- the slights of childhood metamorphosed

into wounds of adulthood, carved with a blunt pen-knife.

The rising wind throws the window open.

02.07.2017