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Not even if is a wildfire in close enough range.
Not even the present is within breath.
For years the answers came, the same
answer, or not the same at all,
spotted in a different tongue, then none at all.
The soft filling of the future tense
that would not fit into a grid, one I could name.
And right in the midpoint of what I thought was mid-
life, a new character padded onto the page.
Who traveled from the long after.
Leaking the afterlife.
And all that year, I couldn’t read, knowing language
could be directional, drawing close. Moving away.
But the character was recurring, then the main figure.
His mouth loaded, the bababa.
Between his diaphragm and hard palate:
phonic vibration and smear.
Strained visage behind my 37th year.
And how did we get here—you and I, I mean.
My child whose modifiers I tend and prune on the screen.
You were a no and then one
of ten thousand things arising in the mind’s snow.
Stay, you bid me, stay.
And from that point on there was no question laid
and there I was, now dragged by
the endless itching
of the clock’s hands, around and around
the now, now, now.
Was there ever a chase?
It’s getting late.
I shiver, touching you
here on the page.
This poem appears in the June 2026 print edition.