We are always running out of time.
When we are born, it is as if
we know this already, with the first
reaching and clenching of tiny fists.
An attempt to take hold of it,
to still the moment long enough
that we may understand it. And
it is there, as we refuse to succumb
to slumber, as the day wanes, as
parents and child care workers insist
it is time to close our eyes and lose
awareness of the way it sweeps by.
It is there, in the excited waking
from each nap and each night,
a return to all the movement and life
that tick off the seconds of the day.
The anticipation of experience, of
an overload to the senses, and
a stirring of that mechanism which
soon will construct memories.
It is with us, this knowledge, even as
we anxiously await the moment when
baby teeth begin to loose themselves
becoming supplanted by the milestone,
a marker of time and illusory permanence,
yet even as we anticipate these summits,
we mourn the loss of childhood which
begins, even as we are still children.
Even as we look to what is to come
we are losing what is now, and the now
is what we anticipated just a breath ago;
so that the seconds tick across minutes
and the hand sweeps past hours, as
days succumb to memory and nights
intermingle with the dreams they host,
the sifting of this finite experience.
We navigate the passages and their
corresponding rites, ticking them off
one by one, imagining each to be
an equal measure, the way each foot
ascended along the mountain’s silhouette.