Image from Kseniya Lapteva
for Unsplash+
The Time of Our Lives
We live
in the future,
but only
for a moment.
Instead,
what we really want
is the past,
fully realized,
the way
we remember it,
different
than it was.
Now, the days run
together,
a watercolor
of one hue, one brushstroke.
We desire
our next future
to be new,
yet familiar,
an echo,
a refrain.
The Geography of Absence
It is defined
by what is not
on the landscape,
a sneaking
suspicion that there
was something
just a moment ago.
Important things may
have happened here,
marked only by the faint outline
of loss, perhaps
a slight rise, a slight
depression in the earth.
The map of absence
has a key,
measured out
in the degrees of emptiness,
a sliding scale
which varies
for each of us.
Conundrum
It was
a child’s
conundrum.
Conundrum,
a weighty word
we all learned
later, after childhood.
A puzzle. We could not
imagine a ton
of goose down feathers
not being lighter
than a ton of the hardest,
brightest gold.
We could hear
the metal’s solid ring
and see how
the feathers
instead would
whisper and float.
We knew that
a ton of gold
could crush us
flatter than
a pancake.
Instead, we’d take
the ton of feathers,
soft and falling
like the red and yellow
leaves we threw back
into the autumn air.
A ton of feathers
would caress and smother us
like the fattest of blankets,
or like so many pillows
we couldn’t even
begin to count.