When too personal texts
become too impersonal,
she wants to curl inside
a conch shell

and sleep like an adolescent girl
from a Virginia Woolf novel, or
Bascove painting
with a drawbridge straight ahead.

All the lovers she’s known
named Steve have died.
Four in all. That’s eery
enough. Sometimes she reads

the wedding announcements
in the Sunday paper
in search of couples
over 50 for no legitimate reason.

Being invisible—
a 24/7 pedestrian
on the sidewalks of New York—
has its blessings.

She counts them each morning
as she counts out the seven almonds
she will eat
to celebrate another day.

She understands those
Thunder Bay cliff jumpers
more than any ancestral cliff
dwellers. But

she’s too afraid
to wake her dormant fears
to stand too close
to the edge. Never

end a poem there. So
she will reread his text
about building a bonfire
in a park in September

before she makes
her next move.