I have grown older.
My life reads backwards
as well as forwards.
Tonight I stand still
between living
and having lived,
and wrong directions mucking up my maps,
and a woman who
loves me, who knows
where I’ve been.
And I look down
at the Bay, down windy streets
at the tiny boats, white dots,
at the curves of blue in the gray
flat sky, the same way
my children
live in me like characters in a play,
like pieces of the language
(insights that never helped).
We grow in spite of ourselves
and know no boundaries
that we will not invade,
like yellow dandelions in untended yards.
In Japanese, ma, the word for space, suggests interval. It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision.
