VESSELS FOR THE LAPSE OF TIME (1) Poem by Jane Gibian

1. Nested squares


What could be held in a month
of your calendar, in the pleached grid
of those windows, that spills out of mine
like water overflowing the rectangular

depressions of an icecube tray? A day
melts and stretches lazily into evening
in the sudden summer, and we place
our palms flat against the sun's captured

heat, coursing from brick walls along
each street: from here each day's
a window, lined up in a crooked row
like teeth inside a laughing mouth.

Flattened grass in the shape of our bodies
was still there the day after: we tried
to hold those days in cupped hands
but they trickled slyly through your fingers.

Walking past a window uncovered
to the night, that flash of someone's life
added to the inventory of sights
I collected to make you smile, an answer

to the compressed biography of postcards,
bound to the span of time in its nested
squares. Daylong we crossed disputed
territories, daylong I looked into

the battered rectangle of a pocket mirror
with its cracked corner and saw myself
divided. In the calendar's endless fretwork
you give each part of the day equal

thought; weight them evenly in your grasp,
until it's time to pull at a thread in the day
and watch it unravel behind us.