Andrea Cohen

Calendar
May 12, 2013 Cohen Andrea

Calendar

 

Some people, after the day

has passed, scratch on X

 

inside that box, as if

the past were a treasure

 

map and the sweet spot

for digging just missed.

 

Others, more hurried, employ

a slash-and-yearn policy,

 

their single diagonal suggesting

a ladder that showed up

 

too late for actual scrambling.

At the edge of known

 

physics, theorists like to say

days and minutes don’t exist.

 

But calendars do: you can mass

produce them with snapshots

 

of aspirations in Lisbon and Madrid.

In a pinch, in winter, they make

 

fine logs for the fire; in summer,

fans for shadeless expanses.

 

The fans burn too. Days are

like that: elastic and highly flammable.

Andrea Cohen’s most recent poetry collection is Nightshade (Four Way Books, 2019). A new collection, Everything, will be published next year. Cohen directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.