Time

You people keep asking, and I keep
answering. Always the same thing.

I hear each breath lift off from my lips
only to lose speed and fail to clear

the drone of these fretful machines.
I want another forty, maybe fifty

years. But you're not offering. So,
what about something to stretch time.

What about a chocolate egg cream
I spent all boyhood envisioning

thick milk sloshing, soda hose hissing
the girl's fingernails, hot pink for all

eternity. Or one summer, as my mother
lay dying in the living room, how

I hovered over her with calipers, measuring
the pauses in her breathing.

Or some winter mornings
in woods where snow is falling

and there's nothing between
the gurgle of coffee and the warm

boozy evening. Give me anything
but certainty. The black smudge

of crow just off the path,
its skyward coverts flickering.

A flash, irrational, at least
until I close in.