Retrograde

It's easier now to go back and edit, 

to change a timestamp the way 

you never could a postmark. 

Our promises for ourselves 

live fluidly, the past 

at the mercy of the present. 

It's easier to stack the deck here,

to claim this poem for yesterday as if

plans hadn't gone unrealized.

A goal forgotten, hours lost

blink out effortlessly;

an all-powerful order smooths the wrinkles.

It would be easier to take hours tomorrow

and assign them to today, as if

I'd been a proper weekday girl. 

Otherwise now I'd have to pretend

to be regretting

all our extra sunsoaked minutes.

I think there is a terror
while still young, but no longer
very young, as we begin to trade in
pure, abstract fears for
real, concrete ones.

Today it was a nightmare
that aged me, by taking death
and chiseling it like a stone from a cloud.
beyond horror, it gripped my heart
and I cried all day.

Even now falling asleep
with my love after love spent
and he sleeping, his ragged breaths & pauses
claw deep in my stomach,
literal mortal dread.

I think for the first time
since I was born, I have realized
not the chic truth that there will be an end
but the fact that it could be anytime,
that it could be now.

quiet in the evening the way spring evenings do,
with bird-songs sailing through the stillness, I
stopped my bike on the bridge opposite our skyline
and photographed its lights against the vast indigo
with its constant companion, the river, dressing up for night.

then in a moment I surfaced from the view, to see
the mirror of myself, just down the bridge, where
some young man had parked his bike to take his own pictures.
I was sure he was with me in feeling that deep solitude
with the sky and the birds and the city and the river.

It might be seen as a joke --
albeit, of questionable quality --
That it would be the second of April
to feature smashed glasses, scattered cat food,
And arriving at work an hour late to a computer
Completely
Crashed.
Now had this happened to a funnier person,
This poem might justify it all,
But instead I offer the epilogue of a not-so-funny observer
That irony is lost on the mediocre.

Talk about forever

April 1: indoors & outdoors today. 

We talk about forever, you and I:

little finite humans spilling it between us

like children repeating big words. 

I like to think myself a kind of scientist. 

I like to have a relationship with structure, with fact.  

I like precision. I like to say exactly what I mean. 

And there are limits. 

Which is to say, when you are this near, 

I feel certain that a moment can only hold so much, 

that in this moment I can only love you this much--

Yet there is more, so much beyond; in fact, 

it seems that no collection of moments

could be great enough to fit this in. 

So we talk about forever.