Immaculate

Without being born, Pandora has no middle age,
only this endless procession of centuries
gone as dank as a cellar, plastered with plans
and the most familiar fictions:
What everyone wanted,
what everyone thought.

She knows there must be a stairway,
a way out, a walk through the cedars
and brambles that tumble toward open shore.
There will be wind enough
to swing her around like a horse on a roof
until she needs no sense of direction,

no ears for more voices.
She will stand at the seam between sea and sand,
feel her body fill like a sail
in the sharp gusts, slaked by sky
as it flees the horizon’s hard line,
by ocean and salt and that clean, dousing light.