Twenty-Seven

“Things take the time they take.”
-Mary Oliver

Looking for myself again
and also trying to lose her
when gray began ungathering toward morning
I anchored my body to beach beside the river.
Sand began to clothe and enclose me
in fine gray silt until I was built
and then unmake and expose me grain by grain
this diffuse brain shaping in water and wind.
Thinking in hours I cannot know the time
it took to create and then erode an entire human.
In ants escorted off the shifting premises
—twenty-seven.

Originally published in Shark Reef
Epigraph from “Don’t Worry,” in Oliver’s Book Felicity

Some thoughts on keeping time (as clocks and calendars and social obligations have lost much of their regulatory meaning during COVID)