You serve no one by being small,
She says, as if we can trust police.
There are no cynics in her studio.
We rise, lock eyes and close them –
A flow filmed, what? Five years ago?
Two thousand and seventeen.
To think (though we should not be thinking)
That was before the rings, the dog, the limp,
The leak, the hole cut in the floor,
Before things I won’t go into,
History she has to live through,
Lithe Texan on the screen.
My Tao is taken from a textbook:
Spin ‘til you reach something
Approaching equilibrium.
She’d never recommend it,
But the physics work for me.