Dear Time,
       

I thought there was an agreement here,
a fistful of birds that I could carry

from one moment to the next
in my half-closed hands

without being bitten
by their peculiar beaks. A day,

I'm finding, is a letter written
in someone else's script, a kind of wobbly

transcription the air brushes along my lips.
The trees murmur like deceased

aunts spilling cups of tea in their
ginger laps. Lips. Laps. The lush insistence

of you, time, pushing against everything
we do. You are a shivering, unflinching

closeness, a tune we all have stuck in our heads,
as we lift blue towels from the washing machine,

drag our minds through the news,
tally the dead, frail as daffodils

trailing their stubborn pollen
along our outstretched arms.

I wake with a quaking inside me, a to-do list
of vitamin pills, the precise

wording of half-written emails, conversations
intricate as Medieval tapestries

glistening with their multitude of tiny threads.
I write to you, dear time, minister of fear

and sex and the hope of the body, to grab
at the visible tremor of a tree's

fog-laced leaves, to note the streetlamp
in a Magritte urban square—the oncoming

darkness momentarily stalled
before that quiet glow.

I want to stuff my mind
with all the living I can. Mortality be damned.

Let's relish another tablespoon
of that tarragon-seasoned lobster sauce

against the sheer glass
of a Houston skyline.

A delicate terror
builds within me.

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Copyright © 2022 Alexandra van de Kamp All rights reserved
from Ricochet Script
Next Page Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission