Sleeping In Grandmother Wolfe's House

Buried here in sheets in this darkened room,
sometimes time sits heavy on the soul.
Some evenings with a last over-the-shudder
look out the window, Red finds herself receding
further, further back, to stone, becoming
the dead thing that fell from the branch,
or the bird-bitten, unplucked callow drupe.

This is the bed where she was born.
The mirror tipped in its walnut frame pins her
flat against the wall, same axe-blade face
suspended there above a crocheted doily
that her grandmother saw, that woman
whose knife pared each portion to its core,
the crevassed heart of apricot and plum.