Our clocks leapt ahead a few days ago and shifted daylight to make twilight seem longer. Since I sat down this morning to figure out what to write the Catholics have chosen a new pope  Time is whizzing by. Already, it is very old news that Banana Joe won the Westminster dog show exactly one year after I started chemotherapy and watched a Pekinese take the top prize on the tv in my hospital room.   Now,  I can’t really remember what my skull felt like when it was bald.

Questions of time, its simultaneous elasticity and unbending finitude perplex me.  A good friend died recently. I wrote the poem below the day before I heard that she was gone.

I first met Penny Montgomery over thirty years ago in San Francisco. I admired her chic style and wit and hoped some of it might rub off on me. She took her dreams seriously, and unlike many others, she put them to the test by leaving everything she’d known behind to make a new life in Montana. I loved receiving her vivid letters and our mutual love of language and stories was something that connected us over time.

Transit

Everything is on the brink
hesitation, soft horn
the fog is hanging on

Morning tea at the cafe
plum blossoms on the street corner
watching for the light to change
petals drift to pavement

Her voice answers the phone
but it is out of time
I’ve left two messages

What is the distance between being and non-being?

The blossoms are predictable
though  I never know exactly when they will appear
I call them cherry and plum interchangeably.
the small notch of difference, unimportant

Our brain cells are alive for some time
after our heart stops and breathing ceases 

When are we really gone?

when the voicemail message has been changed
when we are deleted from the contacts list
when photos are faded beyond recognition
when we are in no ones living memory
when humans are extinct

When the sun finally implodes will the stuff of us still be?

Alive, dying, dead
only one’s a steady state
or maybe not
I treat the first as if it is
as if my friends will be the same whenever I drop in
Even aging isn’t evident
We just pick up wherever we left off

What do I say to a dying friend?
“I love you,  call you next week”

We are conscious blossoms
petals of one season
One moment we shimmer
then pink dot on the sidewalk