Things you can’t control—love, weather, grace, time.
My favorite cliché is race against time.
Like an undertow, her phone sucks my teen
daughter into YouTube, Snapchat, FaceTime.
Our elm’s branches brought the power lines down.
In darkness, distortion of sound, space, time.
Time may change me—Bowie’s cranked-up voice
drifts from a passing car—but you can’t trace time.
She let her hair go silver, wears her lined
face without shame. Her motto—Embrace time.
Death is a salesman, shoes worn from peddling
silence, blank brochures, a briefcase of time.
My mother’s cancer isn’t novel. Nor
is yours. Our worst griefs commonplace as time.
In the high-tech future, will metal eggs
grow children, computer code replace time?
Focused on Eternity, poets tend
to lateness, sloppy with lowercase time.
Miss Havisham’s stopped clocks. White Rabbit’s watch.
Welles’ machine. Classics, a showcase for time.
Not all wounds heal. Not Columbine, Sandy
Hook. Not Parkland. Some don’t erase with time.
In a dream I float between stones and stars.
Wake with wisps of another name, place, time.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 20, Issue 4.
Alison Stone has published five poetry collections, including Ordinary Magic, (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack. www.stonepoetry.org www.stonetarot.com
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A little late (but no later than last year), CPR Volume 13 is now on its way to the printer!