The education of the Virgin Mary

Today, I’m busy listening
to the hold music while I wait for insight
into why and why does wherefore

have to keep following why?
The stone rolled away, the boy gone.
The myth lives on in motherhood

Mary caught in the come-on
and being inside the confines of cage.
And no one to blame.

A falling-barometer breeze ushers me in
to each day and each night a cave.
I don’t know myself, I say to myself,

but I do know. I know I’m unlike
the others outside the boundary
inside of which I paint a self-portrait.

Long ago, a voice that sounded exactly
like mine told me to act, don’t just stand
there. The choplogic argues

that no one can be other than what one
was in the past plus now, minus
the forgotten that keeps coming back.