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Indefinite Time of Life
Like little fish we played around the steel hooks,
afternoons were tinted light sea water,
red bladders of air spouted from our skin,
pulled up endlessly – we were marked by all of this.
This rising made an oily squint seem to
disappear. Still, time gathered and scattered
like fluttering leaves.
The weights on the old hull failed and
the boat finds no mooring –
the dead are coming all the way to the shore, bickering
over our newspapers, arguing about lunch.
Their advice written in an unreadable palimpsest
are blowing away hats, carrying off cars.
Since then books have been weighted with dust,
like slippery salad greens tossed with the world.
How much time in the kitchen, how much of ink,
when a man loses his sense of an appetite, his
sense for the generations. We try to salt
a barely tasted dish,