Cherubim
(for Daysun Schuyler Perkins)
“Time’s only challenger is time.”
—Tennessee Williams, “Androgyne, Mon Amour”
Each day flies more swiftly off and along with it
people slip away, snowflakes in the sun, cherry
blossoms flurry on, releasing from each black-
branched tree. Seasons like fathers further on,
gone, sons whip away on the wind where there
are other and greater imperatives to be done—
and weather varies its vivid multicolored gowns.
There will be one last winter for the father and a
fresh spring for the son, moving on; falls born of
fruitful summers, and climates changing in ways
we have failed to calculate. Each day, details in-
trude their way into the minutes, rude shoulder
in between us and what we have sailed out to do.
Heaven’s brooding eyes scrutinize all these lives
lumbering through, barely slowing to set another
twenty-four hours aside on the shelf for someone
to find or ignore. There is no purpose here, nor an
answer that will satisfy any one of us, as different
as we are, as are all those weeks we have distinct.
Wherever there is, we will get there, by some will.
Whosoever’s wings these are—they are never still.
From Post-modern Blues (forthcoming, Fall, 2021)
