I can feel it coming – the clocks click round and round, and we like to think that because they’ve been wound or batteried, they won’t come to their final halt, our whisk into unmeasured time.

I can feel it inside me, August rolling in like a glamorous wave before another and another and another.

I hold it tight, the small clock key winding and the little boy shoes that give blisters. I hold it tight with blue jeans and wrinkle creams.  I hold my memory like a cleaning rag to my nose, and I write it down, each ugly, every moan in death, in love. I don’t want to lose it,

but my skin wants to un-tent me, flapping how it is.

But what do I have to lose in getting older, life careening me ahead like a machete in a thicket?

Because when it lifts from me, or rather I from it – when I burst out my tent into blinkless light – I’ll be a newborn kid and free to smell how really good is the heaven bread, so fragrant and familiar, so home and close that I can feel the heat.  I’ll drink tall cups of the whole milk.

And then, in my hands, I will hold tightly to nothing.

Then, I will be the one all lapped up, held,

as yes I am held tightly even now, and yes, there is nothing I control even now,

and that is what freedom is: even now – realizing my hands empty. His holding. Faith in a lavish future sight.

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