Then a drawn-out unlearning
of word and figure, the telling of time.
By now Eternity must loom,
especially summers, the elders below
chewing their words and foods on a creaking porch,
night locusts calling back another daytime.
Life must drag, everlasting,
each year a larger fraction,
a term you no longer had the meaning of.
Imagining, one saddens
at the prospect of Love unravelled
and the slow unknowing
of Death, whose tenor had husked one's every testament
of affection and anger,
until one lived oneself back past ditty
(I think of how my daughter chants)
and farther. Through Mother Goose,
nonsense rhyme, to the wordless
wail of straightforward desire
as one wormed one's way to the Woman's belly,
the light going down,
and yet one knew,
from back somewhere,
how quiet it would be, how comfortless, there.
