Asymmetries

I have to return to the clinic for more imaging—
they found some “asymmetries.”

Nothing is symmetrical in nature,
no two things alike,

but these asymmetries might be fatal—
in nature but unnatural,

like the huge white pines at the end of my driveway
planted at the same time:

one grew stocky and healthy; the other got tall,
started to die, broke in half.

Have you ever been driving on a highway and forgotten
where you were going,

as if there were a branch in your brain that split off,
a gap that opened up?

Or seen the way one bird lifts its head
higher in the nest,

grows faster, tips into flight sooner—
if the others even live.

Is this the day when everything inside me tilts,
breaks into before and after?

Cammy Thomas has published two collections of poems with Four Way Books: Cathedral of Wish, which received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Inscriptions. Her poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Image Journal, Tampa Review, The Missouri Review, Nixes Mate, and the anthology, Poems in the Aftermath. A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete Inscriptions. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.