Waiting for Tom, the boy who can fix my computer if
anybody can,
I observe how the minutes, emptied of content,
ooze past like transparent microorganisms
in magnification’s slow motion. I have the time
at last to consider my life, this its stubby stale end
whither, and wherefore, and who says?
But I fail to. I look out the window again.
A wisp from the woods announces that my neighbor
is burning brush.
Wind tugs the rising plume this way and that,
a signifier that doesn’t know its mind.
My desktop is cluttered, but what
can be discarded utterly with certainty
of its not coming back to haunt us from the kingdom
of the lost?
My wife no longer acts like a mistress,
but surely I am too frail to seek a mistress;
passé the pink salmon’s slick effortful flipping
up the icy, carbonated cataracts.
Is there anything to write about but human sadness?
Even if there were, I couldn’t write it today.
My neighbor’s smoke has stopped rising; his fire, too,
is down.
Down Time
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