For Time’s Sake

Old long songs forgotten in the snow,
we violently resurrect unspoken feeling, littered with loves abandoned,
spectral memories poised on the precipice of the new year.
The roman candles crack! — and we fall into now-time,
plunge again into immanence.

This afternoon of thought
the light’s a certain color,
the air’s a certain scent.

And between the solstice and the equinox,
the vernal and the infirm,
we grow down into ourselves,
find original feeling,
learn — whether sphinx or pygmalion –
to pay homage to our childhood terrors and lusts,
feeling our blood quicken as though discovering again
the awakening of our arterial sleep.

Our sentiments hibernate.
We grow younger, imagining with thermal change
that in the months which we believe are promised us
a someday sky waits, and a house with open windows
and stairs in which limbs shed clothes like past lives,
some resplendent spring that’s a nubile summer,
the plane of our existence under cotton candy dusks
amidst relentless botanical life, marine kisses left on skin.

What if you wrote a poem that would be ever more beautiful translated
in a language we’re all looking for,
betraying your native tongue, that familiar heaven?
In the garden of forking paths,
how do we find an old place in a new way?

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