The hair on top of my head feels thin—
and it looks visibly thinner in photos
people have taken, where I have my back to
the camera. Is it vain that I worry about
what it will look like, as increasingly
the clearing gets bigger and wider with time?
Will it be a little pond on which gnats
will skate in the heat of summer, a shallow
saucer of drought the birds will avoid?
I remember being told as a young mother
about the soft spot on the head: the fontanel,
where the bones in a newborn's scalp have not
knit together tightly yet. Maybe I am unknitting
myself at the top. Maybe that's what people mean
when they talk about becoming soft in the head.
Sometimes I dream the light
shining through there falls down
a great shaft without end.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
