Rondeau: Old Woman with Cat

Osteoporosis (one of life's indignities)

is such a splendid name for the disease—

all those little o's, holes in the bone

where the rain gets in, rendering a crone

like me defective, porous as swiss cheese.

I’m riddled at the hips and knees,

roundsided as parentheses

since my shrunken spine has known

    osteoporosis—

and my extremities

have shriveled into lacy filigrees,

breakable as glass on stone.

Naked at the window ledge I drone

to my sleek, supple Siamese:

    osteoporosis.

Marilyn L. Taylor

© 1997; originally printed in The American
Scholar.  Reprinted by permission of the author.