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I have to use codes
now
for what I can't remember --
"Perry Mason" for "periwinkle,"
"Sappho" for "sapphire,"
"gallbladder" for "Galsworthy."
Every numeral is a color;
I weave textiles from phone numbers.
Microscopic explorers
fall off the edge of my brain,
past the tip of my tongue.
In that dive,
beyond the junkheap of unbalanced checkbooks and lost keys,
further down can be found the softening of time,
its skin grown furry and wrinkled --
a moment expanding oddly to fill an hour, as though
a bird of paradise appeared
from nowhere to slow the light
gluey with its beak;
or children whizz by with a crank,
winding the years past in a frenzy of blurs.
Divisions of seconds,
sectioned into soldiers,
marching as vitamins, herbs and creams,
ration my day, and then
bang, a climate change, I am
hanggliding from cold to hot
to cold in syncopation,
buffeted high, then sinking,
riding the currents,
a baby crow just learning.
Body, body, what
are you,
I croon, floating above the chair
where I sit in my office
in one of those stops between tickings,
waiting alone or meeting another's eyes
in some presence I can't quite grasp
outside the skin.
Copyright © Judy Wyatt
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