how easily she crumbles

Just a flick of the wind, sometimes,
an errant and indelicate move
on the part of a cloud, some listless piece
of the stratosphere moving on - that's all it takes
to unfasten her.

It's deceptive, this body, this knotty collection
of bones. In truth, she is nothing but a pile of sand,
privy to the shifting whims of the tide.
But earnestly, with full belief in her grip,
she clings to the cliff side, watches the seaweed
swishing weakly against the shore, no match
for the froth and tumble of the waves, and thinks,
that could never happen to me.

But then, in her pride, in the act of claiming
herself invulnerable, ox-like, intractable in her solitude,
in her distance from all that is ebbing and flowing below,
the high perch from which she cups the world in her hands
(it looks so small between her fingers, how could she not
think it possible?) becomes, suddenly, as fissured as a dead
tree trunk, vertical but incapable of bearing any real weight,
and how easily she crumbles when so little
can keep her fixed to such impossible altitude,
when she is this far away from the ground
she came from.