Rolling out of bed, she levitated, 
fuzzy slippers dangling, suspended 

by her two big toes.  She tried at first
to point her feet downward like a swan,

like a ballerina balanced on a bundle 
of small bones. “Discomfited, as if 

in effigy, I swung above the wilted 
Gerber daisies,” she laughs. Yet some 

accounts describe her less heroically, 
as “rowing distractedly among receipts.”  

Suffice it to say, it was not the effect 
one might have hoped for or expected 

from an alleged elixir of long life.
Before too long, however, she had lifted 

up an orange and a cup of cold pure
water and returned to bed. Her shadow

was not so fortunate, traversing each 
board as it had always done, on hands

and knees, moving down and up 
across each microscopic divot and spur 

to reach the jade bowl by the mirror stand, 
wherein, finding no fruit, it cut her loose.

[William Ramsey writes: I’m a Professor at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina.  My poems have appeared over the last thirty years in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, The South Carolina Review, and Southern Poetry Review. My first book of poetry, Dilemmas, is available from Clemson University Press.]