for Ruby
I made something beautiful today. Using a pen, I wrote across the available surfaces of a smooth, fist-sized rock and threw it into the Willamette. At a cafe on a street that runs diagonally across the other named streets, I drank coffee with an old friend. We talked about the unwavering course of time. Even when you've felt that time has passed quickly or that time has taken its sweet damned time, whether you wish you had another moment to look at his face or whether you wonder when the two of you will be earnest again—the way you were—it's all a singular line that connects your birth to your death.
Talking explicitly about the temporality of existence can be poetic in its openness, its recognition of truth. Talking metaphorically about the temporality of existence can be poetic in its subtlety, in mimicking the covert, yet ever-present underscoring that mortality plays in our shallow breaths and in our deep breaths.
In my drink, a gnat thrashes its legs about in a mechanical fashion. Its wings stuck to the surface of the beer, the bug has no chance of dislodging itself. Yet, it expends all of its available energy—until its blood rushes to its brain and it goes unconscious—trying to get out.
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