Plotting Temporality
Remembrance = memory + longing.
The eye's corridor through the skull.
Small changes mean everything.
The elastic starlight, unfixed
and crawling the lattice of the sky
like vines, like the legs of a spider.
Clouds stack like dinner plates.
Heart is to torso as tooth
is to breast. To encourage association,
to discourage association mean everything.
Unfold, refold the letter, follow the curving
ink, a raven in flight, the immeasurable distance
between small explosions in the cup
of the skull, catching in the hips' saucer.
The limbs, now stilts of night.
The art of accumulation means
everything. The ventricles unfold
from the cage of the heart.
It's the obsession you carry
like a coffin, refusing burial
to the dead.
Sign is to signified as _______ is
to nameless things. Pink fish
in their mating, and in their drowning.
To look at a clock and think
of another thing means everything,
means nothing, means you.
By Suzane Roberts
Suzanne Roberts
Suzanne Roberts is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel. Her memoir, Almost Somewhere: 28 Days on the John Muir Trail, is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. She was named "The Next Great Travel Writer" by National Geographic's Traveler. She writes and teaches in Lake Tahoe, California. For more information, please visit her website at www.suzanneroberts.org
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