Tell the Time

The contour of a bedsheet, a fabric on a fabric
touched coolly, touched softly,
changed or swept of crumbs and

tobacco shreds with a light
queasing pass of the palm.
A quiet now counting itself like

measures before thunder.
One mississippi, two. Touched beneath
the wavering memory of a bald moon.

Result, and residue, we are.
Touched and in time touched, but not in time.
Slowly in the outside air

sparks lift themselves to blink above the lawn.
They cannot tell the summer of your hour
but they coded and told.

Should we mount a conversation
and its fond and glacial impasse, its passed sting?
The movement of the brush along the line

is what I know—at the forest’s edge—of color.
Sanded dabs and coats are interspersed
with the ringing of a muscled telephone.

You have told me if, and when and once,
and the trees, the stars went on focusing the sky
through an amber droplet falling

from the white saw cut in the white pine.
As if they always, star and tree, root and moon,
were falling, will have

been made to fall.
A solstice, an equinox blend.
God would lean into a prismed cloud if God

were what the handyman believed in.
I have forgotten, I have been forgetting something
that once seemed too important

to remark. Love in time is time—love is time in time.
I cannot surely answer
forgetfulness with a silken vow.

How often had the promise been made
that we would go like climbers among the small
green attainments of radishes and flowers.

I ushered a mud wasp out the front door—
and a form of pain or kindness was left behind,
as if these were not the feeding hours

of the cardinalis cardinalis
and then not a brick laid into his soil,
unseeable but still, be still,

interrupting the uniformed grass.

Copyright © 2005 Theodore Worozbyt All rights reserved
from The National Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission