Repeat: water, thinness, time. The past
is liquid and the future is gas. Only
one can I see. Every four years
we live a day not counted and this
won’t read the same in larger font
or tomorrow. Give me a sign: darkness
at noon, a sixty-first second, a joke
from a man who makes sense to me,
who keeps me on a list. A near miss.
I sit in a corner of space dust, spotlit
with an ache for planets, a new solar system,
sun as fulcrum. A hook in the chest
holds on to a lost week. There is one,
a next time; it disappears each morning.