I think I have a problem understanding time.
Just like my grandfather.
I slip
into the past
and don’t know why.
Old Man says it’s because sometimes
I just have my head up my ass and he’ll say,
how is the view
up there
today?
But that’s just because
he thinks it’s a bad thing
to spend too much time
in the past.
Anybody’s personal past
unless you can go way
way back to the old days
when it was always quiet
in the woods
and you could just reach into any stream
and lift out
a
big fish
to cook for dinner.
I have a hard time
hanging on to the present.
The present is like that big fish and I am trying to hold onto it
so I can
cook it for dinner.
But it keeps jumping back into the river
and swimming away
upstream (into the past)
or downstream (into the future).
It’s been a very long while
since my father went to the river
and caught a real fish
and my mother cooked it
and we ate it
with my cousins.
That’s some fish,
my mother kept saying.
And my father kept saying, It was like
that fish
wanted me to
catch him
and feed him to my family.
But my father left the next day
to go look for work on the oil rigs out West.
And I felt bad
because I didn’t eat all my fish,
didn’t like all the bones.
But I should have saved those bones
to remember my father by.
Even
fish bones
should not
be wasted.