National Poetry Month : Vivian Lewin,

 

Keeping Time

 

Okay we played madrigals all that year
with somebody’s brilliant daughter her mind so quick
she’d just skip a beat here and there, rushing ahead.

Holes in the music. Moths chewed my bathrobe, carpet, skirt.
You can’t put that in a memory box. Can’t containerize
anything so unkempt unnameable unkeepable.
Deep holes, keeps. In castles. Finders’ keepers.
Losers all crybabies. My eyes: weepers.

Okay I keep every calendar. Rote lists hand written wrought wrote.
But guess what? I didn’t write the time or number of the so early flight
the morning after dad died, the cold house, my brother across the street
saying “not enough for you” when I smelled chicken wings nearly done,
saw his whole oven full. Built in at eye level. Comfort no comfort food.
Okay he gave me the car keys and I drove downtown, cafeteria style
broccoli casserole and chicken and rice and nobody I knew at all.

Don’t talk like that dear. Your resentment. Re-sentiment.
He might read it after all after all that time this time.
Who does it hurt? It’s you doing time. Keeping it.
You in your dungeon keep rotting away with it
Time moves on. Doesn’t it? Does it?

Okay the whole next year I didn’t get one parking ticket.
Drove dad’s burgundy coloured Oldsmobile all over
and did put money in the meters, not asking special favours,
but despite keeping on cutting everything close to the wire
I the one who got a couple tickets every month had none at all.

On his yahrzeit, on the windshield, from campus parking:
Forty-one dollars. Pay up. You’re on your own now kid.

Okay I kept that to myself. Invisible year of grace
among the nearly illegible carbons of paid parking tickets, fines, penalties.
When will they ever learn? Kept like dolls or bears, quilt scraps, gold crowns,
books lent by people who are dead now. Mildew in the basement.
No reason but a sort of heartbeat, a refusal to stop keeping time.

 

 

 

Vivian Lewin lives in Montreal. She taught quilting, worked for hire in communications, and studied English literature at Oberlin College (AB, hon.) and creative writing in Florida (MFA). Her poems have surfaced in Ariel, the Fiddlehead Review, Field, and Matrix (among others). Her chapbook COLVILLE SUITE FOR MIXED VOICES was published by above/ground press in 2021.