it’s on days like this, the plain
waking up days, the just get it done
or don’t bother days, with pollen in the air,
and cottonwood seed in a sideways drift,
and soccer fields full of yellow shirts,
and kids calculating their fourth favourite colour
in back seats of cars, that I realize
another year has come and gone,
seamlessly as some student, some god,
idly spins a globe in an empty classroom;
if I wanted to do the math, I could:
how many heartbeats have kept me going,
how many times have I wiped the sleep
from the corners of my morning, made coffee,
looked out at the day, my day,
if I made it so
in the coffee shop, the man sitting next to me
has one artificial arm, and two women on the other side
are whispering about cancer, about cutting her hair
now, for a wig, for later —
I’m not eavesdropping; I’m trying to write a poem here,
but everything sneaks in: Leonard Cohen from above
singing about angels and redemption, the river
I cross each day, so obvious a metaphor
it slips under me
what I think is this: we can’t hold
all our love inside our hearts, some of it
always spills over
we could wish for a longer summer, for less to do,
for days braided with sunlight and tadpoles on the lake,
for half-submerged logs covered in moss and ferns,
for that spasmodic moment when the canoe
finds its own belly in the water
and we push off