More Poems by Cecelia Night Vision Wish Song for the End of May Drawing Lesson Without The Visitors Passage More About Cecelia

Cecelia Hagen Spinning Wheels My ferocity is wasted, nowhere to go, turning into a clenched jaw, a finger tap on the steering wheel that angles the car through traffic, no joyriding, no boy hiding in the bushes for me. What do I know? I make up answers all day and believe none of them. Winter, my mother would call me at work, querulous. "Where am I? My God, I don't know how I got here." It was too hard to believe the drum of my heart, to tell her how much I didn't know. I clutched my daughter-love like a sword, cut through all possible pity, told her evenly, steadily, her geographic location, reminded her how she arrived. In this way I sealed off from the terror she wanted me to share precisely because she wanted me to. I would carry her terror soon enough, had broken chunks of it off like stale bread while she was the one fuming at the wheel, tapping her finger, wasting her ferocity in traffic and caretaking and enough frustration to strike a weaker person down suddenly. But she went slowly, and slowly I remember.